April 28, 2020
8min Read
Maisha R.
Searching for some website design inspiration? Then look no further. In this article, we’ll provide a list of some of the best sources to find design ideas for your next web project.
For people who are looking for beautiful and intuitive templates, the Zyro website builder is a perfect place to start. You can find sleek and modern design ideas that are guaranteed to make any website look both professional and engaging.
Scroll through the template selection and preview designs you’re most interested in. If you find something you like, you can immediately use it – all for free. Zyro’s intuitive drag-and-drop builder and grid system allow anyone to easily edit the template to their liking.
Here’s why Zyro is a great source to find website design inspiration:
Whether you’re simply looking for inspiration or searching for a reliable web builder, Zyro’s got you all covered.
siteInspire is a curated gallery of excellent web designs. It exhibits more than 7000 sites, so you’re bound to find new and useful ideas for any project.
The gallery’s range of subjects is vast — from children’s websites, photography portfolios, to news platforms. That being said, the curation team prioritizes simple and elegant designs rather than something gimmicky.
siteInspire is very easy to navigate and offers several useful features that can help in your search, such as:
All in all, if you want to browse through real-life web design examples, siteInspire is a great starting point.
If you’re looking for websites that have much more interesting examples, head over to Awwwards – it’s a platform that rewards the most well-developed and best-looking sites.
Here, you’ll find a catalogue full of compelling projects as reviewed by well-known web design experts and enthusiasts. All websites are scored based on design, usability, creativity, and content. As a visitor, you get to learn what makes them great and incorporate the same elements into your own designs.
Not to mention, Awwwards has:
A theme market can be a great place to look for website design inspiration. If you have the budget and find one that looks good, you can even purchase the theme right away.
Plus, theme developers usually keep the best design practices in mind when creating their products. This is so that non-technical users can easily modify and utilize the template without having to mess with the overall structure.
Though most premade themes can feel generic, TemplateMonster offers a wide range of selections and categories to look at. With more than 32,000 templates, you’ll have nearly endless website inspirations to scroll through.
Here are some of TemplateMonster’s best features:
Best Website Gallery began as a personal side project by David Hellmann, but it soon became one of the major sources to find web design inspiration.
It has over 200 pages of websites, and you can browse through them using the gallery’s filtering system.
When visiting this site, you’ll find:
If you need some professional-looking ideas, check out agency portfolio sites. You can see how experts in the field overcome design challenges and learn from them. They’re also a great resource to check out some current web design trends.
Not to mention, these portfolios are usually visually stunning, so you can refer to them as inspiration as well.
Look for portfolios that have high-quality screenshots and behind-the-scenes explanations. Here are some great websites to start with as references:
CSS Nectar is another excellent catalogue to find great-looking sites. Here, you can find:
If you liked this website, you can subscribe to its mailing list to get up-to-date information about the latest featured works.
For those looking to optimize their design for conversion rates, GoodUI should be your next destination. It has various resources for optimizing any web page, including:
To get the most out of GoodUI, consider becoming a paid member to access the UI experiment results. Or, you can sign up for BetterUI to review your site, where the team will take a look at your website and give you advice on how it could be improved.
As a hub for visual resources, Pinterest is a great platform to look for website design inspiration, tips, and tutorials. Here you can:
Behance is a social media network for designers, artists, and other creative individuals to showcase their work. However, you can use it to search for website design inspiration even if you don’t work in the creative industry.
Here’s what makes Behance a great place for design ideas:
The key to good web design is great user experience. A website shouldn’t only look good, it should also be functional and help visitors navigate through your content and pages.
With that, here’s a checklist of things you need to complete as you design your website:
As mobile users make up the majority of internet traffic, making a mobile-first website design should be a priority. Not to mention, Google puts responsiveness as a major factor in indexing and ranking websites.
Without a mobile-first design, a site’s search ranking could suffer — and so will its conversion rates, sales, and other goals you have set up.
Here are some ways you can improve your site’s mobile user experience:
It’s easier for visitors to look through your content when the elements are not only well-designed but also well-organized. Plus, clean and simple websites usually load faster and adapt to mobile devices better.
Follow these tips if you want to simplify your website design:
Most internet users today only scan content, rather than read through all of it. To adapt to such behaviour, your website design should enable visitors to find information quickly. In addition, the text elements should be able to capture the attention of your visitors immediately.
One way to do that is to improve your site’s readability, which can be done with a typographic hierarchy. Essentially, it’s a way to organize text content based on its level of importance. This way, the most essential information can grab the most attention.
To employ a typographic hierarchy, you need to divide the content into the following categories:
Other than that, using high-contrast colours to underline important information can help direct your visitor’s eyes.
A site’s navigation can also determine how easy it is for users to find information. With good navigation and structure, visitors can figure out the buttons they need to click to reach the right destination by themselves.
On the other hand, poor navigation can make users frustrated and leave your website too quickly. In the long-run, this could result in lower conversion rates, sales, signups, and so on.
Here are some tips to try if you want to optimize your site’s navigability:
Maintaining design consistency throughout your website is crucial. Users shouldn’t feel like they’re going to a different website every time they access a new page.
Furthermore, repeating elements on all the pages can make your website or brand more memorable.
Therefore, it’s important to stick to one colour palette, consisting of one dominant and a couple of secondary colours.
The dominant colour is the one that your website or brand should be known for, while the secondary ones will complement it. Try such tools as Paletton to help you find the right colour combinations.
Other than that, don’t include multiple themes on the same website. Not only it can be tricky to implement, but it can also confuse your visitors.
Making a good-looking website shouldn’t be a difficult task. As demonstrated in this article, there are many platforms that can provide you with many web design ideas.
To recap, here are some of the best sources to find inspiration for your website design:
Now that you know where to look for website design inspiration, it’s time to get creative.
July 25 2020
When you hit a block and you don't feel you have any good ideas, looking for inspiration and observing others really helps. Those are really good sites. Thank you for sharing!
Tomislav T.
Replied on September 06 2020
Happy to hear you like them, Stephanie! :)