Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

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!