What do you expect potential customers to get from your business website? If you can’t answer that question with a few carefully chosen words, chances are you’re not using your website design budget wisely. After all, how can you expect site visitors to “get” your message when you aren’t even sure what you want to convey?
Your website design should clearly articulate your company’s vision, core values, and brand. And it’s not just about pretty pictures and a responsive, mobile-optimized design — your website needs to immediately communicate who you are (not just your business name, but what your brand’s personality is), what you do, and why your visitors should stay and buy from or hire you — i.e. a call-to-action (CTA) button that is just begging to be clicked on.
For inspiration, take a look at these nine WordPress-built websites that have the competition wishing they had thought about leveraging compatible plugins, HTML5 code, and CSS options before launching their site.
Worry Free Labs
Worry Free Labs epitomizes innovation — especially important as this is a company that builds “remarkable mobile experiences.” How embarrassing would it be if they had a lousy site? Their WordPress website uses HTML5 and is perfectly optimized for mobile, which makes locating menu items incredibly simple. And once you get to the “About” page, the first line is “who we are & what’s in it for you.”
Gisi Design
Gisi Design was created with the X Theme — ThemeForest’s most-used WordPress offering. This website is design-heavy (which, again, it has to be because it’s a design company) with very little text. Features that make the design really stand out include beautiful photos, an animated image at the top of the homepage, and social buttons attached to each blog post to make sharing fast and easy.
Facebook Newsroom
Yes, the largest social media platform in the world uses WordPress for its own website and blog. A quick tour of the company’s site reveals it has a similar look and feel to the social network itself, only easier to navigate and cleaner in design. There’s an easy-to-navigate top menu, and the “Company Info” page clearly and succinctly tells you who they are, complete with their history, statistics, and company culture.
Kartell
Kartell’s e-commerce website takes simplicity to a new level. Like the brand’s furniture and other products, the website has a no-fuss style, complemented by the WordPress shopping cart features that allow customers to quickly shop by category without sorting through multiple irrelevant pages.
99U
Winner of two Webby Awards, 99U provides a steady stream of valuable, actionable content for forward-thinking creatives who want to bring their ideas to life. Bite-sized posts complement in-depth interviews and articles, while videos speak directly to visual learners. Subscription service is free with an email address and one click to confirm. 99U generates several revenue streams from one site with book and event ticket options offered below the fold.
Canadian Museum of History
Canadian Museum of History’s responsive website was a no-brainer. Not because it has phenomenal photos, which it does, or because the site is tied to the nation’s most popular museum, which it is. In fact, the most mentionable feature isn’t actually obvious to site visitors: WordPress serves as the foundation for the site’s more than 65,000 digital pages! Everything you need to plan your trip, including links to Google Maps for directions and options to buy tickets to the next IMAX theatre feature, is on the main page.
Ladies Learning Code
Ladies Learning Code is another WordPress.org website with some stellar design features that small business owners can learn from. The site offers a mix of English and French content to promote its upcoming camps, workshops, training opportunities, and social mixers. The site map lets first-time visitors dive right into clearly-marked content (“start here” or “try this one next”) wherever they are on the journey toward improving their computer literacy skills. By the way, if you don’t know how to exploit CSS and HTML5 within the WordPress website design phase, this is a great place to start building your own tech tool chest.
Katy Perry
Popstar Katy Perry uses WordPress for her website and has perfectly captured her persona in the design. She uses a parallax scrolling site with a big picture of herself for the background image and an interesting array of foreground images and text that scroll past. She makes it super easy to check out her social media, buy her album, or see upcoming concert dates.
Tasty Kitchen
Tasty Kitchen is a well-designed website with tons of functionality and special features that allow visitors to share cooking tips and techniques, interact with each other, and search recipes — accompanied, by the way, with beautiful photos. By combining the diverse capabilities of WordPress and BuddyPress (a WP plugin that transforms any website into a social network), the site administrators provide a community vibe with an educational venue.
Most of these top-performing WordPress websites have simple page layout designs with large buttons and plenty of white space. Well-written content is supported with high-quality photography, charts, and videos. Visitor assistance — like maps, reviews, and newsletter subscription bars — are easy to locate and use.
Let these sites inspire you to push the limits of creativity to serve your own customers. Bluehost can take care of the rest with our packages specifically designed for optimized WordPress hosting.
