5 Great WordPress Blogs to Inspire Your Design

A great design can make all the difference to the success of your blog or website. If you choose to go with WordPress as your chosen Content Management System (CMS), then the essential structure and set-up of your site will be handled for you and you’ll be ready to publish content from the word ‘go’. Countless other businesses and bloggers have shown how successful WordPress blogs can be, so there’s really nothing holding you back.

Other than the content you populate your site with though, it’s the theme you design that will set your site apart from the thousands of others. A professionally designed theme will prevent your site from looking run-of the-mill or ‘home-made’ and will help to elevate and complement your content, thereby decreasing bounce rates, improving engagement and increasing profits.

And a truly impressive design is possible with WordPress. Here are some great examples that will hopefully inspire your own efforts:

Design the Planet

‘Design the Planet’ is a marketing agency that promises to help brands to promote themselves and avoid ‘generic mediocrity’. As a company operating in the field of design themselves, it’s important that they should have a good looking website.

Fortunately, this WordPress blog is incredibly well designed with a clear theme (the bulk of the page is taken up with a ringed planet) and a minimalist appeal. There’s animation, a fancy loading screen and a professional sheen throughout. An orange ‘Go!’ button begs to be clicked and the whole thing is a clear demonstration that this team know what they’re doing.

Guy Gungell

Guy Gungell is a producer and songwriter whose website drips with atmosphere showcasing a great color palette (consisting of dark greys, greens and whites), high definition images and clear calls to action. The theme is consistent throughout the site and adapts well to different screen sizes.

Grind Spaces

Grind Spaces showcases work spaces in New York and Chicago and a brilliant design is only likely to entice more entrepreneurs. The design is built into a single vertical page, with a clever scrolling effect and the company motto is clever displayed in an image that plays with perspective. This is a site that uses a lot of clever design touches that make you smile – and it’s all the more memorable for it.

Twenty Fourteen

Twenty Fourteen is not a blog or a company site, but rather the ‘default theme’ that WordPress have been offering throughout 2014. Serious businesses shouldn’t consider using a layout that is present on so many sites across the net, but it’s still a good source of inspiration showing a less obvious layout, beautiful images, a stark color palette and crisp typography. The menus and adaptive design are also spot-on.

Tech Crunch

Tech Crunch is not only one of the most well-designed WordPress sites on the web, but also one of the most successful and well-known tech sites. This is a site that manages to put a lot of information on the front page while avoiding looking crowded, thanks to the use of large patches of white. The logo is small yet prominent and navigation is easy and simple. A great example of good design for content-heavy blogs and a great bit of inspiration to end on!