20 great examples of WordPress websites

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Since bursting onto the coding scene back in 2003, WordPress quickly became a favoured content management system (CMS) among web designers. It's grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions every day.

Over the past year, many launches and site re-designs have used WordPress as their main CMS. Here, we've picked 20 of the best examples of WordPress websites to give you a taste of the talent on offer in the web design world.

Words: Ryan Taylor

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Words: Ryan Taylor

01. Branded07

Branded07 serves as a fantastic example of how elegant a blog can be. This beautiful site, designed by Rob Palmer, is clean and devoid of clutter. What fascinates me most about the design, though, is all the attention to detail.

Take, for example, the simple blog search form. Not only does it occupy an odd location, but it’s designed in a far more interesting way than a simple box. The precision and elegance extends to many elements, such as the buttons, illustrations and even the pagination. It’s just a WordPress skin that’s wonderfully executed.

Throughout the site, you’ll find layouts tailored to the content. With a CMS, it can be tempting to have a single layout that all content flows into, but here each page feels as though it’s had special consideration to ensure its proper delivery.

02. Circa

Paul Mosig from Racket selected WordPress to power the website for Circa, a restaurant situated in Melbourne, Australia. Paul has captured the spirit and distinct feel of the restaurant’s decor to create an equally distinct online presence.

More and more businesses are beginning to promote themselves on the web, and restaurants are no exception. Circa shares menus, recipes, reviews and special offers online. The customer’s dining experience is of the utmost importance to Circa.

The restaurant wanted this philosophy to come across on its website. “Because we were able to clearly define the required content types and build custom templates within WordPress, it allowed us to be truly uncompromising with the graphic design,” says Mosig. “The beauty of WordPress is that it allows you to create complex designs, which are ultimately maintained by a client with very few technical skills.”

03. Web Courses Bangkok

Web Courses Bangkok is an English training centre providing beginner-to-advanced web and graphic design courses in Bangkok. Carl Heaton, founder of the company and designer of its newly relaunched site, decided to use WordPress as its CMS.

“We release lots of content, partly for marketing ourselves, but mainly for our trainees to use,” Carl explains. “The blogging roots of WordPress made it very easy to get the content out quickly and easily.” Carl was most pleased with the flexibility of WordPress when it came to building the templates for his design.

“I found that other CMSs end up forcing you in one direction and with this redesign we wanted the CMS to work for us.” Since the launch of WordPress 3 the platform is really starting to hold its own as a fully fledged CMS and the WCB site is a great example of what it’s capable of. It’s all a far cry from the ‘cookie-cutter’ implementations of the past.

04. Iron to Iron

Iron to Iron is a two-person company founded by designer Kevin Richardson and developer Jonathan Christopher. Of their own site Kevin says: “We needed to effectively display our brand as well as our philosophy.”

They use WordPress for all of their client work, he adds. “It makes building any website easier, ours included. Automating things, from the portfolio content population to collecting contact form submissions, is one of the many benefits.”

They’re also using the Pods CMS plug-in to give them additional functionality and control of their content. Christopher is also a member of the development team for the plug-in: “We devote a consistent amount of time to that project in order to better utilise it,” he says.

05. Eddie Diaz Design

Eddie Diaz is a South Florida-based web and graphic designer. When asked about his CMS choice, he replied “Using WordPress as the CMS allowed me to focus more on the design and layout, since the CMS made the populating of content a snap.

“It has also given me better SEO and search engine results. I’ve noticed my site being ranked higher due to the CMS and the clean code and layout. I believe WordPress is a winner in many ways, and I’ve used it for other personal and client projects with great results”.

06. Yoke

Yoke is a studio based in Bristol. The design and build of the site was a team effort by co-founders Jay Bigford and Alister Wynn. “The key to the success of our website as a marketing tool for our business is to have valuable expertise-based content on there,” explains Bigford. “We’re constantly adding blog posts researching into topics that relate to our target clients.”

The guys selected WordPress as their CMS. “We can add posts seamlessly and easily, then set up good interrelated articles between these posts, offering the user a less linear journey through our content,” says Bigford, who goes on to discuss workflow.

“Using WordPress enables us to speed up the build by narrowing the number of templates we use. We know we’re designing for a CMS, so we’re strict with our output and always stick to a maximum of three templates. This allows us to make sure we get fewer, tighter and more polished templates, rather than many, loose pages.”

07. Grind

Grind is the gateway to a new workspace platform that lets “talent collaborate in a new way: outside the system”. The site provides information about their platform, including what it is like to work at Grind and how to join.

Magic+Might designed and developed the site in collaboration with Co:Collective and they selected WordPress as the CMS. “We leverage WordPress to manage content and templating for the site. WordPress is also used to manage the content for our members-area site, and our blog, the Grindist,” explains Josh Campbell. “We picked WordPress for a number of reasons. First we wanted a stable, feature rich platform but without a large investment, that would be able to grow with our needs.

“We also wanted a clean management interface for our writers and editors so they can focus on creating great content.” There is a fantastic community surrounding WordPress and the guys 
at Grind feel that this reflects on the kind of collaborative community that they are all about.

08. Guy Gungell

Our next site is a showcase for Guy Gyngell, a music producer/songwriter. It was designed and built by Adam Allaway at Flint & Tinder. Adam also selected WordPress as the CMS to power Guy’s site.

“After a fair amount of research and experimentation with Joomla, Drupal and WordPress, I settled on the latter for my own company blog, The Tinderbox. The progression to using WordPress as a CMS after that was a natural move,” Adam explains. “In my opinion where WordPress really excels is the fact that my clients find it so easy to use.

“This means that with very little effort on my behalf, they can be up and blogging and tinkering with their SEO meta data the very same day the 
site launches. Custom post types are one of my favourite features as they make creating a CMS for 
a client so much easier.”

09. Myjive

Myjive are a digital experience agency. The launch of their new site was a team effort between Krista Engler (interactive designer), Ron Edelen (creative director), Albert Banks (technical director) and Linsay Guinaugh (copywriter).

They selected WordPress as their CMS and I caught up with Ron to discuss their decision. “WordPress provides a highly extensive set of features that can be customised to meet our needs,” he explains.
“Using a CMS allows for quick population and editing of menus, copy and images,” he continues.

“The revisions functionality also allow us to make sure our content is accurate. We’re most proud of the Work section. The CMS allows us to associate Work with the Client, the Services and Tactics performed on the project, the Industry, the project’s Flickr photoset and any related Vimeo videos.”

10. Rodesk

Rodesk is the website of a newly created interaction agency who provide brand identity, concept design, web design and marketing campaign services for 
their clients.

It was co-founded by Laurens Boex and Jasper van Orden. They selected WordPress as the CMS to power their infographic-
focused design.

“WordPress is the best CMS for sites such as Rodesk, we’ve developed with it for quite some time,” explains Boex. “With a ton of plug-ins and extensions and a world wide community of supportive developers it’s easy to work with and integrate quickly.”

11. Ribot

Ribot is a Brighton-based company that creates simple mobile products to inspire and assist, and was started over four years ago by brothers Antony and Jerome Ribot.

Its site is powered by WordPress, using a theme designed in-house with HTML5 markup. Jerome explains: “We love to be semantic when crafting HTML, so HTML5 gives us the ability to use more descriptive semantic tags than just plain <div>s, making the code easier to read, structure and understand.

“The hardest thing to do when starting with HTML5 is wrap your head around the concept that a page can have multiple headers and sections now, and so more than one H1 tag. It’s a different way of thinking about HTML, and means you can see a document as a collection of redistributable modules of content rather than just a single page.”

12. 6Wunderkinder

6Wunderkinder’s website shows off its first product, the free and easy- to-use task management tool, Wunderlist. The site was designed by Jan Martin and the team selected WordPress for the job. “It’s the most commonly used CMS; there are millions of websites that use WordPress,” reasons Martin.

“There is a large community behind it, so you can access support and find answers quickly, and you can use tons of plug-ins. We put a lot of effort into a custom design. We’ve received a lot of attention for our ‘about’ page and invested a lot of time in designing and building a story for each individual working at 6Wunderkinder”.

As WordPress continues to evolve, more and more developers are turning to the system for their CMS needs. The wave of so-called ‘cookie- cutter’ websites that WordPress has been accused of starting has long passed. 6Wunderkinder is a testament to that fact and a great example of what can be achieved.

13. Girl With a Camera

Girl With a Camera is the photo blog of Ashley Baxter where she shares photography of her life and her commissioned work. The site was designed by Matt Brett, who migrated Baxter from Tumblr to WordPress.

“I was using Tumblr for a good while, but became fed up with the constant downtime,” she explained. “I knew WordPress was hugely customisable and would give me a lot of flexibility over how I could display my photos.”

Meanwhile, Brett says the feature he’s most proud of is the way that each post’s layout and background colour can be changed to best suit the content. "One of my absolute favourite things about WordPress is how fast I can go from an HTML template to a working theme.”

14. Tinkering Monkey

Tinkering Monkey is an online shop that sells simple wooden goods for everyday living. Everything is made in the garage-turned-woodworking-studio of Mike Cheung, product designer and creator, and Paula Chang, who manages the business and developed the site.

“We used two CMSes,” explains Chang, “The store is run through an open-source shopping cart system called OpenCart, and the other pages are managed through WordPress.”

There are many e-commerce tools to choose from, but Chang wanted to avoid the fees and functionality limitations of other solutions. “It had all the features that we wanted built-in already,” she says, “and a back-end that was easy for us to jump in and make changes. It basically gave us full control while keeping our costs to a minimum.”

15. Intellidogs

This digital downloads store is run by Karen Wild, and enables users to build their own personalised dog training manual based on the needs of their pet.

The site was designed and built by Alex McGibbon, who selected WordPress for the job. “It was decided early on that the users needed to trust Karen in order for them to make a purchase,” McGibbon explains. “A blog is a great way for Karen to establish a rapport with people, and as it’s such an important feature of the site, WordPress seemed liked the best tool for the job.”

Thanks to the open source nature of the tool and its plug-ins, he was able to modify the eShop plug-in to meet the client’s needs. “I made the store items open in an Ajax window that closed once the user had added that chapter to the cart,” he explains. “This made the process of adding chapters very snappy, and massively sped up the visitor’s task of customising their manual.”

16. Jenny Bristow

Love food? Love HTML5? Then look no further than the home of Ireland’s Good Food Ambassador, Jenny Bristow. Created in WordPress by the team at Web Design Northern Ireland, it’s refreshing to see HTML5 being used for client work.

Developer Derek Johnson explains the decision to go with HTML5: “The nature of WordPress makes it easier to distinguish between <article>, <section> and <div> content,” he says.

“When I was planning this project, it just seemed more logical and straightforward to use new HTML5 elements than to have a lot of nested divs. The site uses a host of new elements, a couple of new input types (‘search’ and ‘email’), ARIA roles and block level links. I also love the way sectioning content works to create a document outline and give semantic structure to web pages,” adds Johnson.

17. Obi Media

Designer Christian Senior was given the task to bring the Obi Media site up to date. "I’m a big advocate for the WordPress platform and since the site was going to be updated by various people we agreed that this was a good base for us. This would give us the freedom to customise everything, right down to the admin panel, and make managing the site an easy task.

"I added a blog, which will provide two key roles. First, it will enable us to keep our clients up to date with what’s going on and second, it provides a hub for visitor interaction, through comments and asking questions.

"I also made use of WordPress’s custom menus in the header and footer of the site so even non-techies can re-arrange and edit the site’s navigation should we see a need to push visitors in a certain direction."

18. 42BELOW

Digital creative agency Gladeye developed this site for iconic New Zealand brand 42BELOW Vodka. Interactive director Tarver Graham spills the beans.

"WordPress has become a natural choice. It’s really blossomed into a fully featured CMS system and a platform in its own right, on top of which you can build your own functionality. There’s a danger that if you make too many custom edits you lose the ability to update as new versions are rolled out.

"We walked a fine line with this website, but with WordPress 3 around the corner we made sure we kept the core intact. We also used a lot of jQuery, in particular jQuery Address to build the navigation. jQuery offers a huge and incredibly useful JavaScript library. We find it indispensable for the rapid development of site features."

19. CRACK Magazine

CRACK Magazine is a monthly paper publication and online platform that offers the latest in cutting edge music, art, reviews, and listings. They asked design agency Fiasco to create a flexible site that works as a desktop and mobile website, with an easy-to-use, intuitive content management system.

Central to the brief was the need to increase CRACK's user retention rate and lower user drop-offs, as the rigidity of their current site was clearly limiting their growth. The team at Fiaso worked with D:Coe Design to create a fully responsive design using a WordPress core that focuses on adaptable grid structures to show off a wealth of content, while looking smart on across different browsers and devices.

"The key aim for us was creating a site with lots of great content and a standout design but balancing it with fast load times and easy usability across the board," says Dan Coe, director of D:Coe Design.

20. Derren Brown

"Derren Brown is a witch!" According to some, this is all we need to know about England's foremost head fudger. But millions of people want to learn more about this leading illusionist, mentalist, hypnotist, painter, writer, and sceptic, and with his site often pushing past two million monthly page views, it's clearly the web that people turn to to find more info.

Pixel Dandy's Marc Hagan-Guirey, the man behind the recent redesign says, "The project took about six months. The team comprised of Duncan Godwin who built the site, Abeo the project manager and myself with the design and concept.

"The site was built using Photoshop CS6 and Illustrator CS6. Duncan, the developer, built the site using WordPress with a sprinkling of jQuery plug-ins, lots of emails, and cups of tea."

• These examples were originally published in .net magazine.

Which example of WordPress was your favourite? Let us know in the comments box below!