Once upon a time WordPress was not taken seriously as a CMS.

Today, with millions of websites built on it, WordPress has taken its place as one of the most used platforms for building a website.

CNN, Forbes, Reuters, eBay, and a  slew of other big names  are built on WordPress. There are a lot of great reasons to use WordPress, and it will offer you a framework to build a great website design too.

However, you may still need some ideas of what goes into a good WordPress website design – after all, while WordPress may provide a framework, it only comes packed with a couple of basic themes.

You may have read some of my thoughts on some of top designs for some more focused topics, such as sports and news. But this time I’ve decided to mix things up a bit. Everything on this list is based off of pure, great design – so you’ll often see some sites that you’ve never even heard of before.

Mario Batali

Good tasting food means nothing without good looks. Mario Batali, the famous chef, doesn’t just make tasty food, but tasty marketing too. Breathtaking functional web design for tasty food. Warning: You might get hungry.

The Butcher’s Daughter

Like the fancy design of cooking show intro, The Butchers Daughter, a New York juice bar and café has an elegantly designed website. This design already gives me the impression that the atmosphere at their physical location must be a good one to be in.

Tinkering Monkey

A thoughtfully designed website that practices the same precise design in its products. The site’s cleverly selected color palette and a beautiful image gallery might easily charm you to purchase one of their cool wood-based products. But, that’s the intention, right? :)

The Canadian Olympic Teams

Canadian Olympic Team has a great WordPress website. Its design makes it very efficient, with a lot of images and just the right amount of text to introduce you with the latest achievements of Canadian Olympic Team.

The Connacht Rugby team

A floating dashboard makes you feel like you’re in charge here, but choose the “Team” option from the top many and look at who are you dealing with. If you’re Connacht fan, then you’ll be proud, but if you’re not, you’ll certainly envy them.

Hughes Estates

With eye catching featured images, customers will certainly notice what you are trying to offer. This site features beautifully huge images in their galleries that will certainly point out the qualities of their merchandise. What more do you need to start converting customers?

Captain Creative

Captain Creative’s website truly lives up to his name. This is a page works a great benchmark for aspiring designers using WordPress – it’s ready to make you smile while making you aware of the quality design behind it.

Jess Marks Wedding Photographers

Weddings always remind us of good times and fancy looks. Jess Marks will  remind you why you should hire these photographers for your wedding – their site marries (pun intended…) professionalism and playfulness all into a one site.

Revolver Revoler Design Agency

I’m always glad to see an award winning design agency that uses an awesome design themselves. Instead of overwhelming you with text, this website guides the user through symmetrically arranged rollover images, each one hiding interesting story.

New Deal Design

When used tastefully, I always love a site that integrates beautiful videos broadly into their design. The folks at New Deal Design, unsurprisingly a web design company, do this very well.

Web Courses Bangkok

These guys teach a variety of web courses, and clearly convey their offerings in their design. Web Courses Bangkok have been able to design a good looking, ultra functional website using WordPress.

Mylene Sanches

While this site itself is in Portuguese, even if you can’t read the language the high quality images speak for themselves. One of my pet peeves on some poorly designed sites is the inconsistent image quality. Never just put random jpegs on your site without taking into consideration a consistent resolution you should be using. You don’t have that problem on this site. With this ultra-fancy design, it’s a site worth visiting for the spectacle.

Harvey Nichols

When your company is in the fashion industry, your brand needs to be all about the “look”. This definitely extends to your website too. That’s why Harvey Nichols put a lot of effort in designing their e-commerce website.

Protest

Bold, appealing, innovative and good looking – sounds like the adjectives of a great shirt. And believe me, these guys at protest.eu make those, but they have also designed a quality WordPress site. In a day where we feel like we are overwhelmed with choices, we should be limiting choices on the  home page with just the bare essentials for each target personality. Well played, guys.

Typographica

Typographica is for not only a great spot to catch a beautiful and functional design powered by WordPress- it’s also a great resource of typefaces and type books. It even has some reviews on different fonts and typographic designs. They also integrate their ads well into the design, so that’s a bonus in my book!

LPG Stations

If you’re out with your car and enjoying the ride, don’t panic if your gas lamp starts flashing. This website will lead you to the nearest gas station in a great style.

Meeting Result

This site is all about creating a more streamlined meeting process for its users, and they’ve used WordPress effectively to convey their philosophy in their site. You won’t be greeted by your typical slider of featured images on this site. Give it a try and you may want to consider this style for your own site.

Bonus: Two Cool WordPress Themes To Check Out!

In case you are looking for some further inspiration as to what you would like for your new site’s style framework to be, I’ve come across two cool themes that I would like to share with you.

Dirty Saloon Theme By Premium Coding

The Western continues its slow rise back into fame, and since the Internet can sometimes feel like the Wild West, it’s only a little appropriate that a WordPress theme like this would show up. If you are considering opening a saloon, here’s a great theme design that could really attract some customers for you.

Time Travel Theme By ThemeForest

Time Travel, how to explain you as a theme to my readers? You should just check it out. My first impression was this is how Apple would approach a blogging platform if they ever made one. Let me know if you’ve used this theme before, I would be curious to see the ways that you’ve applied the theme to your site.

Do you have any designs that you really like that you would like to show? If you do, please share them with us in the comments!