Blog Design Studio

Popularity of WordPress is clear in its own way, however it becomes crystal clear when we see small businesses, professionals or even big corporations are giving preference to WordPress over other CMSes. WordPress as a CMS has evolved and is used to build beautiful and professional websites. Lets check out the following 35 websites that are powered by WordPress, BuddyPress, WordPress MU and aren’t used just as blog.

1. h Mag

h MAG is a high end luxury magazine for the Hoboken market. They print 15,000 copies that are placed in every room at The W Hotel, delivered to every doorstep in town, distributed to over 100 retail establishments and handed out at the Path and Ferry stops. h Mag uses BuddyPress & WordPress MU to publish variety of content and is a highly interactive site and design.

2. Creative Ad Awards

Creative Ad Award is a fantastic advertising archive, serving advertising fans with high quality ads. They provide world’s most sophisticated, creative and fresh ads. Creative Ad Awards has highly customized WordPress to achieve this kind of design.

3. Kodingen

Kodingen is a cloud development environment, code editor, hosting service, database administration program, and collaboration platform. It includes web-based access to file systems and web-based FTP and SVN. This whole application has been developed as a BuddyPress plugin. It’s a fantastic presentation of what can be achieved by combining power of WordPress, Programming and Design.

4. Clouds 365 Project

Clouds 365 is a project by Kelly Delay, who decided to upload image of the clouds everyday on that website. The site has run successfully for 1 yr and now Kelly has decided to start the next year. Clouds 365 project got really popular and has some nice following. It’s a fresh new design and an excellent example of running a photo blog using WordPress.

5. DinDins Foods

DinDins Food is a New York city based company that produces organic toddler food in Manhattan. DinDins uses WordPress and Shopp plugin to power this e-commerce portal. The site wears a fresh design and goes with the theme of “Green”.

6. WSJ Magazine

Wall Street Journal is one of the most reputed media houses and they’ve selected WordPress as CMS for their website. WSJ’s skin is pretty neat and is a wonderful example of magazine theme applied on WordPress to achieve this result. The site is heavily customized to give it the look of an online magazine.

7. GigaOM Pro

GigaOM Pro is a WordPress/BuddyPress-powered premium research membership site, focused on four verticals: Mobile, Green IT, Infrastructure, and the Connected Consumer. A network of independent analysts provide in-depth research papers and research notes, which subscribers can view on the site or download as PDF documents. It’s a wonderful combo of BuddyPress features and a professional design.

8. My Telegraph

My Telegraph is the social networking part of The Daily Telegraph, one of the leading newspapers in The UK. It’s powered by WordPress and BuddyPress. Website’s features and design compliments The Daily Telegraph’s website design. This shows the power of WordPress as CMS.

9. IBN Live

IBN Live is one of the most popular websites in India, It’s powered by WordPress and has used various plugins to empower this very famous website. IBN Live is CNN-IBN’s venture with a clean and online newspaper like quality design.

10. Solo Practice University

Solo Practice University is a WordPress/BuddyPress-powered premium membership site, focused on building an educational and professional networking community for lawyers and law students. The theme is made in such a way that each blog acts as a classroom and using BuddyPress, they host group lectures for Law students. To be honest, this is one of the most beautiful and clean looking law sites that I’ve ever come across.

11. Better Codes

Bettercodes.org’s mission is to empower and engage software developers to share their ideas and thoughts. Connect them with like-minded people and allow collaboration between them. It’s a well-designed combo of WordPress & BuddyPress that is helping “Bettercodes” to grow at a good rate.

12. Ride Oregon

Ride Oregon is the official site for Travel Oregon’s (the Oregon Tourism Commission) focus on cycling-related travel and tourism in the state. Ride Oregon integrated WordPress Mu and BuddyPress to showcase cycling events, mountain biking trails, road rides happening in the state. It’s a fantastic website design and will attract your attention as soon as you’ll visit their homepage.

13. Irrational Games

Irrational Games is an award winning video game developer located in Boston, MA. The company has released games such as BioShock and Swat 4. Irrational games has an extensive and powerful community and it is powered by combo of WordPress mu & BuddyPress with a wonderful website design that enhances the overall experience.

14. Official Gazette

Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines is a blog that is edited at the president’s office and is one of the most visible blog from the government of Philippines. The blog provides news about the country and the government. It’s powered by WordPress with a nice and clean website design.

15. URB Magazine

URB is a monthly American magazine devoted to electronic music, hip hop and urban lifestyle and culture. The magazine was founded in 1990 and the website is equally popular. The website is an awesome example of how WordPress can power such busy and beautiful websites with ease. The site gets more than 10,000 visitors/day, has more than 9000 posts and some 40+ contributors.

16. Watermelon Ministries

Watermelon Ministries is a non-profit organization that provides creative services to other non-profit ministries and missionaries around the world. The site boasts a very beautiful website design that conveys the message of being creative! It’s powered by WordPress and even features a shopping cart running with WordPress.

17. Justin Guarini

Justin Guarini is American Idol season one runner up who is also TV Guide Network’s resident hosts. In addition to seeing him on the red carpet for TV Guide during Award Season covering The Oscars, The Grammys, The Emmys and more, Justin also hosts their movie premiere and junket specials. The site is powered by WordPress, it features blog, the website and a forum – we would have loved it even more if it used bbPress to power the forums, but then we can’t take the credit away from this nicely designed website running on WordPress.

18. Kim Kardashian

Kim Kardashian got popular after the launch of E! Entertainment reality series “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” Kim also banked on the controversy created with the launch of her sex tape with Ray J, a famous singer in America. Even Kim’s beauty got spellbound with WordPress’s features and this amazing website design.

19. Atlantic Southeast Airlines

Atlantic Southeast Airlines, Inc. was founded in 1979 in Atlanta, Ga., by three determined entrepreneurs who dreamed of safely connecting small communities to the Atlanta metropolis. Atlantic Southeast Airlines features and nice and clean looking website design that is powered by WordPress and is an example of the few airline companies using WordPress to power their website.

20. UPS Racing

UPS Racing website is powered by a completely customized WordPress theme that features behind the scenes video, photo galleries, blog posts, twitter updates, games, and promotions for the team. The site also features a custom administration module that allow editors to update promotional content on nearly every page, making it a great example of showcasing the power of WordPress.

21. HeyPapaLegend Studios

HeyPapaLegend Studios are specialists in composition, sound design and recording with a refreshing blend of youth & experience for the ad industry. They’ve used WordPress as CMS to power their beautiful looking website that comprises of flash, audio, videos and AJAX to showcase their work.

22. MySpace Developer Center

Who doesn’t know MySpace? It’s the same social network that you left to join your friend’s at Facebook. Anyhow, the site is powered by WordPress and features a trendy and young website design. We love the fact that the site is beautifully designed although there are slight issues in the website’s coding. Is anyone hearing us at MySpace? Probably they’ll do so when some interested developer will listen to us.

23. The Streamy Awards

As the first and most prestigious awards devoted to honoring excellence in web television, the Streamy Awards identify and celebrate the pioneers laying the groundwork for a new and dynamic entertainment medium. The website features bright colors and a nice looking website design powered by WordPress.

24. The Walk to Washington D.C.

The Walk to Washington is a initiative to gather 1,000,000 signatures on their petition for greater access, research and treatment for dealing with depression. It’s a beautifully designed website with great blend of colors and lighting used in the background. The site is a great example to showcase the power of WordPress as CMS for event based websites.

25. LA Marathon

The LA Marathon uses WordPress to power majority of its website, including static content, a forum powered by bbPress, videos, photos, and more. It’s a community that inspires athletes to connects them with each others. LA Marathon boasts nearly 20,000 participants and 1 million spectators and is one of the biggest organized road races in the world.

26. Harvard Gazette Online

The Harvard Gazette is Harvard’s official newspaper, highlighting faculty research, administrative staff, students, and events. Harvard is world’s most renowned institute for higher learning and its a no wonder that it’s part of this list. They decided to use WordPress to power this beautiful with easy to navigate website and that itself proves the ability and reach of WordPress.

27. Joint Use

Joint Use is an initiative to increase opportunity for children and adults to be more physically active. They encourage the shared use of gymnasiums, athletic fields and playgrounds by schools, private organizations etc. This helps in reducing the cost. The site is powered by WordPress and bbPress powers their forums. The website design is white and has used images to give the extra flair.

28. PerqWorks

Perqworks.com is Time off management application that manages leaves for your organization. Its powered by extensively customized WordPress for not just the front-end of the website but it integrates with the Perq Application. It’s a great display of what WordPress is capable of as CMS and not just for maintaining quality designed websites.

29. Kimberly Caldwell

Kimberly Caldwell is an american singer who came 7th in American Idol’s second season. She currently hosts various shows on Tv Guide Network. The celebrity decided to use WordPress to power their website that will also feature her debut album which is currently work in progress.

30. Leeds City College

Leeds City College was formed with the merger of Leeds College of Technology, Leeds Thomas Danby and Park Lane College Leeds & Keighley merged to form one of the largest and most influential colleges in UK. It’s using WordPress to create a course catalog that contains more than 2,000 courses and also uses WordPress to power its primary website.

31. Dot Kite

Dot Kite offers professional design services in many different areas. From furniture to consumer electronics, from packaging solutions to graphics and brand identity. They use WordPress to power their website and its not only nicely designed website, it uses javascript effects to make it visually more appealing.

32. Creative Spaces

Creative Spaces is a website that helps you to find suitable and affordable space to develop, exhibit or perform your work. Not only the concept is amazing, its the site’s design that steals your heart and attention instantly. It’s a fantastic display of website design & features combo running on WordPress.

33. Golf Royalty

Golf Royalty is popular irish website for golfers. It features innovative and dynamic reviews of Irish Golf Courses, Interactive Irish Golf Maps and the latest news & reviews. It’s a well designed, content rich website that uses WordPress to easily manage and display its content.

34. The Ford Story

The Ford Story is a website powered by WordPress integrated with various social media websites. The focus of the website is to connect with the customers and be open about the happenings around the ford cars & trucks. Ford is a fortune 500 company and they’ve used WordPress as CMS for this website and it means a lot for WordPress.  The Ford Story’s website design is one of my favorites as it’s a blend of great colors and uses javascripts to add various effects on the webpage.

35. 101 Holidays

101 Holidays is a unique selection of some of the world’s greatest travel experiences. Each of the holidays on this website has been carefully researched, and individually chosen by two of Britain’s leading travel writers, David Wickers and Mark Hodson. Launched in January 2009, 101 Holidays was named as one of the year’s 10 Hot Websites by The Times Magazine. 101 Holidays uses WordPress to display the content in a fantastically easy to use navigation and filters the destinations depending on the choices made by the user.