10 Noteworthy WordPress Sites
“But I thought WordPress was for blogs.” I’ve heard that so many times; some people aren’t aware that WordPress has grown beyond its humble beginnings as blogging software. WordPress can now handle all sorts of website needs. Here are a few impressive examples.
Newark Mentoring Coalition
You take a look at the home page of the Newark Mentoring Coalition, and it’s hard to believe that this is built with WordPress. But if you take a look at some of the pages of the site, such as the sponsors page, you will understand how easy it must be to update for those who need to maintain the detailed content.
See http://newarkmentoringcoalition.org/
Beau Monde
One would hardly believe this is done with WordPress, but this lovely Philadelphia restaurant site with noteworthy graphics uses a combination of image text and HTML text. This allows the viewer a beautiful look and the search engines the text they can read (important if you want anyone to find your site on the web).
See http://creperie-beaumonde.com/bm-about/
Brian Burns, Radio Consultant and Programmer
As more people look for work via a custom website, take a look at Brian’s site. The graphics draw in the viewer; one wants to learn more. Once again, WordPress makes each piece of this site easy to edit.
See http://brianradioburns.com/
NJ Social Media
Eva Abreu’s New Jersey Social Media site is proof how far one can take WordPress without being a web designer oneself. Eva is using a WordPress magazine theme called Arras Theme to style her site.
See http://njsocialmedia.com/
River Road Dental
Even the dentist is using WordPress!
See http://www.edgewater-dentist.com/
Renova Environmental Services
Here is another site using large photos on the home page – this doesn’t look like a blog, does it? Unless you look at the code, you can’t tell that it is done using WordPress.
See http://njenvironmental.com/
Ultra Wellness Center
Lots of information can present a challenge to a designer. This Ultrawellness Center site presents much information in a clear, welcoming format. This site is a combination of the wonders of WordPress with good design.
See http://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/
Biotality
Love the giant, cuddly dog – you can still use the big photo look of a well-designed site and use WordPress. Note the use of the size of the word “digestive” to draw in the user to important information. And the orange in the buttons and food photo plays nicely with the sky blue illustration in the background.
See http://www.biotality.com/
Dermatopedia
I highlighted this site because I liked the use of WordPress as a database site, where the user can retrieve information.
See http://www.dermatopedia.com/
Scotch Plains Public Library
I developed this site for Scotch Plains Public Library in New Jersey so the librarians could add and edit events, resources, links and other information on their own for library patrons. WordPress is intuitively easy to learn, so anyone who can manage a word processor can learn to update a page or post.
See http://www.scotlib.org/
If you have a favorite site done in WordPress, feel free to leave the URL in the comments. I may do more of these posts on noteworthy WordPress sites, especially ones with good design.
Hi Leora,
Thanks so much for the mention! I love using WordPress for the NJ Social Media website, especially for the SEO benefits and the capability to make changes quickly and to create new posts on the fly.
There is a learning curve though and I’m still learning as I go (I’m self-taught). I find it helpful to have some quiet, uninterrupted time to play around with WordPress as you are learning, and also to have some basic knowledge of HTML (which again, I’m self-taught; I found a book designed for young kids to teach them basic web design, so that’s how I learned about HTML!)
Thanks again for the recognition and for posting this list of notable WordPress websites! I’m honored to be included.
Regards,
Eva
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Eva,
“I’m still learning as I go” – that’s why yours is such a great one to show – one can do so much with WordPress if one has the patience to learn. Yes, book for kids are often a great way to learn many topics (I used kids’ books a few years back to learn needlepoint).
WordPress is, essentially a platform / foundation from which to build your site on. The sky is pretty much the limit, it’s just dependant on how much time / skill you want to invest in it, and how much you want to allow it to deviate from core functionality.
Quite a few sites I’ve built were done in WordPress purely for the CMS intuitiveness, for example: http://www.inventspace.co.uk/
The entire site (including the fading images, box colour and positions) are controlled though the CMS…via. Custom Post Types and Custom Field Templates.
Thanks – the link you sent was a lovely example of what one can do with WordPress – wonderful how you made it so the client can control the details through the backend.
Thanks for the Newark Mentoring Coalition mention! I forwarded this to the team involved in the NMC :)
Nora, thank you for sharing the site with me. Good luck to the team with this noble project.
Nice list! Newark Mentoring Coalition instant fav… not sure if its their logo/colors or the layout.
Thanks for picking out your favorite, Dhaval.
Favourite from the list has to be Beau Monde, then Biotality.
Pretty poignant for the topic of this article: I like WordPress sites that don’t look like they’re built in WordPress. In my eyes,yYou have succeeded producing a good design if I View>Source and am surprised to spot ‘wp-content’.
The whole ‘wp_list_categories / wp_list_archives’ sidebar has kind of lost it’s charm on me. For the blog section of the site it’s pretty functional to navigate around, but on other pages it looks like it’s there for as an after-thought; where you’ve got no real idea of what you want to fill that space, so…get_sidebar to the rescue!
Well said. You are encouraging me to do another one of these lists – my plan is, in about a month, to muster up the energy and time to search around for new “noteworthy” sites.
Great job pulling this together Leora! I was just reading your LinkedIn discussion and admiring some of the examples of WordPress sites that were submitted. Then, I saw you’ve already posted this article.
This list is proof positive that you can build great sites using WordPress that don’t look anything like the traditional WordPress blog that we’re all so familiar with. Thanks!
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Pretty impressing sites! I love the design at Biotality :-)