![[A screenshot of welovewp.com]](/pics/welovewp.com.png)
WeLoveWP.com highlights great looking WordPress sites, and it’s powered by WordPress, too!
From time to time, someone will hear that I’m involved with WordPress, and ask me a few questions about it. Some people already have a WordPress-powered site (either self-hosted, or on wordpress.com), and some have never actually used it, but they’ve heard of it. Often, they just want me to show them a WordPress site, so they can see what it looks like. Occasionally, someone will ask whether any big companies or famous people use WordPress. And one thing I often hear is along the lines of, it just does weblogs, if I have a business site, I’d want to use something else, right?
But in reality, WordPress is an excellent tool for managing a business site. When I tell people this, they’ll often ask me for some examples of non-blog sites using WordPress.
So I end up searching for old bookmarks, looking through my feed archives, and checking the Codex until I find some suitable choices. Likewise, if someone just wants to see some examples of WP sites, I want to show them something that really stands out.
Now I’m finally going to document a really nice selection of sites that I can point them to for several examples, a sort of “Best of WordPress”. Some sites just look good. Some are examples of famous celebrities, companies, or organizations. Others showcase WP in a non-blog capacity. In no particular order, here is my list of Awesome WordPress Sites:
- Alex King’s Crowd Favorite not only has great design, but is a perfect example of using WordPress to power a business site.
- And Crowd Favorite, in turn, is responsible for All Things Digital, which is powered by WordPress-MU. Alex also has a great series of articles about building a customized WP site.
- ChickSpeak is another WordPress-MU site, with a focus on women’s issues. It’s structured more like a social network than a blog. There’s an article outlining ChickSpeak’s development that’s interesting, as well. via: photomatt
- If you grew up in the eighties like my wife and I, then you can remember when musician Thomas Dolby was blinding everybody with science.
- CNN’s Political Ticker blog is a WordPress.com VIP Hosting site.
- Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer blog is another WordPress.com VIP site. Scoble has been an icon in weblog circles for many years now, and is famous for his prolific output, as well as for being an author and a former Microsoft technical evangelist .
- Yodel Anecdotal is Yahoo’s corporate blog.
- delicious:days is a food blog that looks good enough to eat. Simply beautiful.
- NASA Ames Research Center is powered by WordPress. This group is responsible for many of NASA’s cutting-edge research projects.
- PlayStation.Blog is the official PlayStation blog from Sony U.S.
- Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House, has a blog called The Gavel. WordPress is in ur guvrnment blogging ur lejislashun!
- Ford Motor Company’s Global Auto Shows site doesn’t look much like a blog, but it’s all wrapped up in WordPressian goodness.
- CSS Remix is a showcase of sites with
great design. And the site itself looks schweet. - welovewp.com highlights many WP-powered sites. Some are business-oriented, some are more standard blogs, but all of them have really great design. Oh, and of course, welovewp.com is powered by WordPress, as well.
Of course, the sites I’ve listed here are only the tip of the iceburg. There are tons of fantastic WordPress sites in the wild that deserve as much attention as these. Do you know of some? Post them here, and whenever somebody asks you about great WordPress sites, you can just give them a link to this post!
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109 Comments
I love almost all the great designs featured on weloveWp. Helps me see to what all is possible and can be achived with wordpress.
Nice list of sites.
I was sad to see that I didn’t make your first list
Maybe the next round?
Major sites are awesome, definitely. But…
I like -interesting- sites. And it is honestly more interesting to look at small projects and local sites, that are heavily customized with lots of wild plugins and custom template tricks. Based on WP of course.
For example, the site of this small sausage manufacturer in Sweden is really interesting since it is built with an older version of WordPress – but not looking like a typical blog. Custom subpage menu, multple layouts, blog turned into news section, custom frontpage and other useful features.
I have a list of 30+ such sites, some built by well known designers and companies but most built by local talents. I turn to these sites for inspiration, and I have learned a lot from it. Try it yourself, and you will probably see the value of it. (8
and I would like to show you a website I run for showcasing good looking websites powered by wordpress. It is wpgarden.com. Please see if you like it.
Thanks
Sadish
I hate self promotion, but well, as far as I know, I have the ONLY harry potter fansite that is powered by wordpress
see it at http://hpbeyond.net All I need is a wordpress-mybb bridge and my site will be fully interactive 
That HPBeyond website is nice. Love the use of background images to dress up a site. Nice work!
Those are all pretty nifty websites.
I like to see what the big boys can do with a little thing called WordPress. But for my own entertainment I like to see what the average Joe can do with a niche site. like mine even…. niche for sure but WP powered.
iceland.intracore.com
Wow! What a great list. I really love your post, it’s so nice to have a list like this!
Great work!
Pritthish and Sean: Those are both nice looking sites, but still pretty standard blog layouts, overall. Granted, some of the ‘celeb’ sites aren’t stand-outs, design-wise, but were included because they illustrate big name people/companies using WP. But again — nice designs!
Sadish: Ah, I wish I had run across your site for my original list! Everyone, go visit WP Garden! One funny thing — I had run across one of the sites currently on your front page (Who Is Jen Gordon) for completely unrelated reasons. She did a site for the city of Canton, Georgia, which is where I live.
Carl: that sausage company site looks pretty good. And yes, it’s good to see small businesses doing innovative things, too.
I think my Wordpress site, ITsVISTA, is a good example of how flexible Wordpress is. I’ve integrated Google Search, bbPress, Pligg, Headliner, as well as adding automatic link harvesting, glossary, FAQ, link exchange, and a pile of plugins for other smaller tweaks that is to long to list here. All this without really knowing much about PHP (I can copy and paste, but I don’t know how to write it from scratch).
Persian Online Magazine :
http://farya.com/
Very nice list, the first one, Crowd Favorite is the best: they have choosen a very nice colours palette for the template, it’s very clean.
Great list – I’ve known a few of those sites for a while.
We recently set up a few sites powered on wordpress which are moving away from the traditional blog format, and there is another which is being rolled out this week.
I’ll spare you all the shameless plugs, except to suggest Popular Nostalgia as our latest example, which is almost ready to take public posts after finally ironing out the glitches. We’ve not moved too far from the ordinary layouts etc with this site, but the actual content and posts are a move away from the standard blog. It is somewhere in between a blog and a wiki…
I appreciate that sounds rather complicated, but it isn’t: it’s like wikipedia, but with opinion instead of facts – i.e. what events from the past meant to YOU!
shameless plug over! Wordpress is the ideal platform for such sites as we’re trying to get quality writing and content out there into a professional and working site, that is easy to use for all – wordpress is the best answer, without the budget for a team of coders!
Arts based sites such as ours thrive on open source software, for the benefit of everyone.
I am quite happy with my own site thank you very much!
http://www.garandstiger.com/krgblog
AceMan
Thanks for the kind words Dougal!
nice list, although I will say that the Thomas Dolby site really sucks. Its just like a simple wordpress template, that as text going over the bounds, not a top site at all.
We chose WP for My Biggest Complaint. Social networking for complainers, you ask? Yes, there is such a thing!
We’ve coded a lot of new stuff that we might release as various plugins at some point. We just introduced a feature that we’re calling (in anticipation of a plugin release ‘WP-Friends’), a cool way to filter posts, comments and votes based on friend associations created between users on the site.
We’ve been playing with WordPress in the office on a daily basis, love it! Pity the WordPress search engine hasn’t been explored further, advanced options, filtering, separation of posts/pages? … WordPressMU is next on our hit list to work with.
Any ideas on how to squeeze any more juice out of WP? http://redblock.com.au
Release another batch of links soon, those examples were great!
This is pretty good information. Thanks for sharing.
A really “classic” Shakespeare related website built with WP: http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/
Another example, if needed, for flexibility.
No Brasil é meu site sobre violão!
So proud to be “awesome.” Thanks so much for the props. See you at WordCamp?
Nice example… I love almost at that list
I pretty proud over my own site actually =)
Shameless Self-promotion:
http://www.makenosense.net
Hey Dougal, nice list – see http://soccerlens.com and tell me if you think it’s any good
Scoble and Yodel are not awesome design except content
Yodel Anecdotal, Scobleizer, and Thomas Dolby’s sites are not in the list for their designs. They are examples of celebrities and big companies using WordPress. In the last paragraph before the actual list I highlighted the three cases for inclusion in my list:
So, no, those sites don’t stand out, design-wise. But they are famous names that many people would recognize. (Scoble is kind of an edge-case, since he’s only “famous” within the blogging community.)
And then of course there’s my site!
I love WP for websites. In fact, my school website is 100% blog style on WP and unashamedly so. At first, it didn’t look like a proper website, but given the way we update the website so easily, it’s actually turning into an asset because:
1. Rss is a fundamental part.
2. pages can be done quickly.
3. theming is easy.
moreover the updating style really helps to create a much more vibrant website than a static site. That’s very helpful in getting people to come back!
more about “The Blog IS the Website”.
Thanks, WP!
Nikki:
Well, I certainly think that it’s awesome that Yahoo uses WordPress
I wish I could come to WordCamp, but it’s just not in the stars for me. For one thing, plane fare and hotel rooms just aren’t in my budget right now. And for another, I recently started a new job, so I don’t have any vacation days built up, yet. Maybe one day I’ll be able to coordinate the money, work time, and family time such that I can participate in some sort of big web-oriented gathering. Preferably, with my whole family, since my wife is a web geek, too
I’ve been using Wordpress for my blog for a while now and just recently convinced my boss that it can be used as a CMS – I’ve now created a new corp site using WP and it’s working out marvelously, thanks a bunch to Codex, forums and some handy plugins
This is a good one http://www.trackbunnyfilms.com
Heya! I’ve just added this list into my latest blog post.
It’s a fantastic article you have here.
My own blog is undergoing some major design changes and this list would provide some ideas on what I could integrate in my site.
Do check it out http://blog.thedanielrichard.com/ and drop me an email to give me some tips and suggestions along the way.
This really should have been called 14+ name droppings of famous people and corporations that use Wordpress.
Don’t get me wrong some of those sites are great but part of what makes Wordpress so appealing is it’s accessibility and ease of use. This list just seems interested in star f—–g.
Just my opinion.
James:
I think I made it pretty clear that name-dropping was one of the criteria for the list. The idea is to impress people on any of three fronts: “name-dropping” (use of WordPress by famous people or companies), visually impressive design, or use of WordPress in a non-blog context.
In my view, six of the links above made the list more due to “name-dropping” than the other factors: Thomas Dolby, Nancy Pelosi, Scoble, Yahoo, Playstation, and CNN. And each of those covers a different sector (entertainment, government, blogging, internet infrastructure, electronics, and journalism).
Good post. I can show these sites to my next client.
Nice list. Most of them are usefull. NASA Ames Research Center – NICE SITE ! I was impress when I was there first time.
Our site uses Wordpress, although we’d like to think that it doesn’t looks like it does!
You can see it here: http://www.WiiDS.co.uk!
Hope you agree
Thanks! There are some great looking sites here.
I would add a site that I’ve worked on (yes, shameless): http://www.osskins.com/main
It’s similar to the purpose of CSS Remix.
Some great sites on that list.
I always thought the same thing. Wordpress was just for bloggers. I was wrong. Good Post!
Good to know that Wordpress can be used for more than just blogging. I’d love to try experimenting on creating sites that uses Wordpress as the framework.
Very nice list. Most usefull. J have been playing with WordPress in the office on a daily basis, love it !!!
These are really great sites to be able show to to clients that are looking to build a wordpress site. It’s nice to be able to see so many sites all in one place.
I just did some digging and found a whole bunch of sites that don’t look like Wordpress and posted them here: http://blogosopher.com/?p=244
Some of them are mentioned above- some not.
Hello,
Let me know what you think of my site. It is a photo tour of ny city that I have been working on for a year. Let me know what you think.
Chris
http://www.theweblicist.com
Hi, great article, I love wordpress and I’m learning everyday from it, I’m just finishing my personal site as a Florida Keys lover and frequent visitor, http://www.traveltothekeys.com powered by wordpress, let me know your thoughts.
Thanks!
Nice list of sites.
Wow, very cool list.
Some great sites there
OMFG! These sites are great. Very inspiring indeed. It goes to show that it’s NOT just another Wordpress weblog eh!
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