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Last Updated January 2 2023
I have an ongoing collection of inspirational websites that are built with tools like Squarespace, Weebly, Wix and Wordpress. These are my favourite websites from that collection.
This list reflects my taste— I prefer websites with strong typography, clear navigation and bold photography. Check out my best website builder roundup if you'd like to build your own website.
Douglas Cardinal studied at The University of British Columbia before moving to Texas and becoming an architecture student. His love for nature flows through his work and creates a unique flow of design.
Right as you enter his website, the tagline “Without any preconceptions, I evolve a design from the inside out, open to all possibilities.” mesmerizes you. His philosophy page is equally impressive, with mentions of his “signature style of harmonious curvilinear forms,” “understanding of architecture as a tool to better the world,” and more.
The central part: His portfolio items are placed a bit deep into the website under Work \> Categories (Spiritual, Educational, Health, Museums, Masterplans, Housing, Lodging, Civic, Commercial) \> Pages, but each portfolio piece is well presented with great pictures. We’d recommend keeping the portfolio items as easily accessible as possible.
Sasaki has been in the works for over 65 years and only continues to grow. Their design style blends many different outlooks to create a forward-moving design concept with sustainability at the top.
Their website has a modern feel to it. It has fantastic fonts, amazing animations, high-quality photos, and concise copy.
On their Projects page, they have a search bar to find if you are looking for any specific architecture design project and filters if you want to look at their projects in a particular sector, region, service, or type of architecture. In addition, each project’s details include multiple well-shot photos from across the project’s premises, and each photo has a precise, well-describing caption.
Just like with the Projects section, Sasaki nails all the website’s pages. In short, if you have a big architecture firm, Sasaki’s online portfolio and the website design are worth looking up to.
Benjamin is a photographer that captures some amazing images of harsh environments that’ll give you the chills just looking at them. His work is often completed in Iceland; you can find images of beautiful landscapes and animals that live in the wild.
If you visit his website, you’ll immediately notice his photography is the hero of the website. The homepage has nothing but a slideshow of full-size photos he clicked. Besides that, there’s just a small navigation bar that’ll take you to other essential pages.
Overall, the artist’s website is minimal and is built with potential clients in mind. Look at it from his potential clients’ point of view, and you’ll see why I say so: Potential clients of a photographer want to see their work, contact them, or know more about them — in that order. Benjamin ensures the visual hierarchy takes the clients where they want to go.
You can figure out this beauty company as it says it all in the name. Super cool skincare products that find their color from natural fruits and are infused with other powerhouses like green tea.
This clean, D2C website focuses on just one thing: Sales! The first three sections of the website focus on selling: 1. The hero section shows the best offers. 2. Below, they have a “Most reviewed” section that showcases best-sellers. 3. Next, they have CTAs for their collections. And sections below that build social proof and uplift their brand—something that compliments the goal of the ecommerce website well.
Besides focusing on the goal, it also follows the modern website design aesthetics elements. For example, it uses a great font, a suitable color palette, high-quality product photos, a hover-to-reveal-further navigation bar, and more.
Church with 6 different locations in the San Francisco area. BACC is a Christian church that is open to a wide variety of individuals.
Inspired by and located in Kansas City, Jones Bar-B-Q is famous for its delicious flavors. The restaurant started back in 1970 and has since grown to produce sauces that can be purchased online from anywhere in the world.
For the website, they have chosen a red-based color palette for branding, so the visitors instantly connect them with something hot or exciting.
From a hierarchical viewpoint, they have an image of the freshly-made hot sauce and a big and bold text that reads “SAUCE MADE WITH LOVE IN KANSAS CITY” at the top. Then, there’s a clear navigation bar (with a CTA to their online shop) and a separate highlighted call-to-action button, “Shop Sauces.”
In short, the hierarchy leads to their store. Their store is a typical three-column store made with the Squarespace ecommerce platform.
Allbirds sells men’s, women’s, and kids’ super comfy casual shoes. They are made with natural materials like wool and offer a unique style choice.
The ecommerce site features excellent copy, really good images, and a natural flow for potential buyers. Plus, everything is optimized for conversions — for example, notice the navigation bar: each link is to a commercial page; the navigation to non-commercial pages like the contact or about page is placed in the footer.
They also have great remarketing in-store: Whenever a visitor visits a product page but doesn’t buy the product, they are shown those products under “Take Another Look” right at the top of the homepage (whether the visitor is logged in or not).
The Supernatural brand features an exciting, plant-based way to get creative in the kitchen. All of their powder products and recipes are vibrant in color, better for you, and fun to use in the kitchen!
The no-copy, no-CTA hero section gives the website a clean look. And the yellow-based color scheme matches with their packaging and ad & social media post colors, giving it consistent branding.
Their shop section has a lot of negative space, product image thumbnails that change on hover, and minimal captions. The product description copy is straightforward and well-structured, and each product has associated customer reviews at the bottom that add social proof.
Minna is an organic tea company selling many different tea flavors in individual cans or a variety packs. Their teas are free of the excessive sugar you’ll find in most teas yet still taste light and delicious.
The full-sized header image, the white space throughout the homepage, the CSS parallax scrolling effect, and the appropriate colorful sections…all are examples of modern-day web design trends. Also, minor details like adding nutritional facts and relevant certificates near the “Order Online” CTAs elevate the visitors’ trust in the brand.
Note : The Minna website is more like a landing page for branding. The CTAs take potential buyers to their Amazon listings.
One minor error you should avoid: The navigation text isn’t contrasting enough to the background image, so the visitors will struggle to see the “Shop Tea” link.
Feastables is a chocolate bar brand created by MrBeast - one of the most popular and influential YouTubers.
Its website landing page with a semi-flat design uses the classic blue and pink MrBeast color scheme. It also has all the MrBeast elements sprinkled throughout the website - massive giveaways, philanthropy, an image of Jimmy aka MrBeast, quirky reviews from Chandler and other team members, etc.
Other than the whole MrBeast branding and modern web design, the website has snappy and easy navigation, accessibility settings, a live chat/chatbot, social media buttons, logical structure, and perfectly placed CTAs.
From a marketing-on-the-site viewpoint, they use popups and spin-to-win wheels to collect emails for email marketing, they have a chatbot to increase conversions, and they have put average reviews at the top of each product page to give visitors social proof, etc.
In 2013, newlyweds Matt and Ish started the company Ocelot Chocolate right from their apartment. Their passion for organic, quality chocolate, combined with their design skills, has helped their company flourish, reaching customers worldwide.
In Zurich Switzerland you’ll find this small and intimate festival that includes low key bands and delicious snacks. It is put on entirely by volunteers and is a non-profit organization that uses any earnings it makes to help put on the next festival.
Moon Choi is based out of New York City, and the designs of this line fit well within the city. They are sophisticated and combine menswear into women’s fashion for a sophisticated look.
Personal Effects is a menswear line located in London. You can find items for men ranging from basic tees to outerwear. All pieces are handmade with attention to detail using the best fabrics available.
Rumba Watches has locations in New York and LA. They also offer stylish sunglasses along with their watches. They make functional pieces, that are stylish and made to last.
Chef Pierre Thiam not only creates delicious food in the fine dining world, he also writes and teaches his skills in the kitchen to others. He has catered huge events that have involved the President and big name celebrities too!
Tasty Shop has some pretty cool and different recipes, that look delicious! Aside from that, you can purchase their products like cookware, bake ware and utensils in vibrant color choices.
An all around lovely and clean-cut website for all of your recipe desires. Find collections based on meals, in addition to snack beverages and more. You can subscribe to a monthly newsletter as well to have recipes delivered to your inbox.
This site is a digital food publication based in Singapore. You can read about all things related to food, travel and nightlife. They provide authentic reviews on all their trials so that you know what your getting into!
RyuCreative is a boutique-style marketing agency in Los Angeles. The female ran company has successfully assisted several different companies in PR, Social Branding, and Creative Design.
Currently located in Los Angeles, visual artist and designer Mindy Nguyen helps brands with identity, art direction, web design, etc. She currently freelances and also works with ilovecreatives Studio.
Benjamin is a photographer that captures some amazing images of harsh environments that’ll give you the chills just looking at them. His work is often completed in Iceland; you can find images of beautiful landscapes and animals that live in the wild.
If you visit his website, you’ll immediately notice his photography is the hero of the website. The homepage has nothing but a slideshow of full-size photos he clicked. Besides that, there’s just a small navigation bar that’ll take you to other essential pages.
Overall, the artist’s website is minimal and is built with potential clients in mind. Look at it from his potential clients’ point of view, and you’ll see why I say so: Potential clients of a photographer want to see their work, contact them, or know more about them — in that order. Benjamin ensures the visual hierarchy takes the clients where they want to go.
Oishii is a Japanese-based company featuring the Omakase Berry. The company prides itself on quality over quantity berry farming available at its locations in New York, LA, and New Jersey.
Their website uses a fast-loading, high-quality, full-size background video for the hero section. The video showcases the freshness and the quality of the berry, which demands the visitor to react: ‘Nice! I want that!’. And as soon as you feel “I want that,” the next thing you’ll see is the CTA to their online shop.
Update: You can now buy The Omakase Berry at Whole Foods Market locations throughout New York City and New Jersey.
Scott Snyder is a product/object photographer based in Costa Mesa, California. His photography is clean-cut and top-of-the-line quality, as apparent from his minimal photography portfolio website.
The professional photographer showcases his best photos with plenty of negative space on the homepage. You can find more about each photography project by clicking on the associated photo: He mentions his roles in the project, what he did to successfully complete the project, about the client, and more for each photo. It’s a lot of (well-written) text, but it follows the “show and then tell” principle I discussed in the intro.
Besides showcasing his work on the homepage, he has a separate Work page where he has displayed more of his works beautifully in a two-column layout.
Even the overall website experience is fantastic. Scott uses easily-readable fonts; the scrolling animations are on point; there’s a small ‘about me’ section; there are appropriately placed CTAs (Contact, Instagram); etc.
Adrieana is a photographer raised in New Jersey. She has some sharp and breathtaking images of animals, people, and more. There are a lot of black and whites for a classic yet loud vibe. She also used to be an opera singer and learned a lot about what it meant to succeed from her years in that field.
She uses a slider to show her beautiful photography in the portfolio section. I love the images but am not a fan of the portfolio design choice here. It isn’t bad per se but looks very 2015ish — but it sure is a way to showcase photography in case you are looking for something that isn’t just photos stacked in columns.
Wild Heart Flowers is a floral design company by Christina Hartman. Gorgeous weddings and unique special events make up her equally gorgeous portfolio. It includes work featured in Bridal and Interior Magazines, among other things.
The Wild Heart official website is elegant, well-structured, and to the point. Overall, it follows all the modern website design trends:
Overall, a great Squarespace portfolio example, indeed!
Clean, elegant design. A great example of what you want a wedding website to be. Plus: lots of room to showcase engagement photos.
Avery Cox is located in Texas, where she adds a unique style that is colorful and bold to the spaces she designs. She gained experience working in New York, with some big name designers that allowed her to take what she learned and apply that to her own business.
Ver Designs is a design and merchandising company located in California. They work on commercial spaces, project management, architectural critique and more.
Singer-Songwriter based in Toronto that focuses on writing music that a variety of individuals and emotional states can connect with. You can access his blog, listen to his music and learn about upcoming events on his site.
Try Alpha is an organization made up of groups around the world, and videos for those interested in Christ. No specific background is necessary and it’s open to opinions and questions from people of all backgrounds that have an interest in learning more about Christ.
Josh is from the Bay Area but has traveled throughout, sharing his music, dance, and acting talents. You can find music on his website and links to his YouTube channel as well.
For the kind of work Josh does, his personal website should display Josh’s fun and artsy/energetic nature. And boy, does the website deliver! Everything from the professionally-shot photo of Josh dancing on the homepage to the vibrant colors and curvy fonts suits the personality Josh would want to communicate.
A couple of nit-picks:
Devon is the Squarespace website design guru. If you need an impressive website, this is your guy. Additionally, he provides training and additional plugins that you may need.
You can see Devon in action in the hero section video. Plus, there’s a nice photo of him coupled with a very straightforward introduction to what he does right below it:
Remember how, in the introduction, I said your personal website should be all about you and showcase your personality? Devon’s about page is a great example of displaying “you” — your passions & personality.
You may have seen Lin-Manual Miranda in the Broadway show “Hamilton.” He is also the creator of that play and has won a ton of awards, including a Grammy, Tony, and an Emmy.
His personal website showcases who he is simply yet brilliantly. It uses a great color scheme, has great photos of him and his work, and is constantly updated with new news pieces about him and links to his work if published on OTT platforms.
Scott Snyder is a product/object photographer based in Costa Mesa, California. His photography is clean-cut and top-of-the-line quality, as apparent from his minimal photography portfolio website.
The professional photographer showcases his best photos with plenty of negative space on the homepage. You can find more about each photography project by clicking on the associated photo: He mentions his roles in the project, what he did to successfully complete the project, about the client, and more for each photo. It’s a lot of (well-written) text, but it follows the “show and then tell” principle I discussed in the intro.
Besides showcasing his work on the homepage, he has a separate Work page where he has displayed more of his works beautifully in a two-column layout.
Even the overall website experience is fantastic. Scott uses easily-readable fonts; the scrolling animations are on point; there’s a small ‘about me’ section; there are appropriately placed CTAs (Contact, Instagram); etc.
Adrieana is a photographer raised in New Jersey. She has some sharp and breathtaking images of animals, people, and more. There are a lot of black and whites for a classic yet loud vibe. She also used to be an opera singer and learned a lot about what it meant to succeed from her years in that field.
She uses a slider to show her beautiful photography in the portfolio section. I love the images but am not a fan of the portfolio design choice here. It isn’t bad per se but looks very 2015ish — but it sure is a way to showcase photography in case you are looking for something that isn’t just photos stacked in columns.
Commercial photographer that provides images that stand for something and accompany important messages. You can check out his “press” tab on the website and see where his images have been featured and read articles about the photographer and his skills.
The horizontally scrolling portfolio looks a bit weird, but you’ll know that it scrolls horizontally anytime you enter the website.
Duncan Trusell is a comedic podcast host. He has episodes that discuss and explore spirituality and debatable topics like after life and reincarnation for example.
The Friday Habit is a system to help entrepreneurs to grow their business by intentionally setting aside time on Fridays.
Meiwen is a professional photographer that features travel, people, editorial, and interior photography. He is also a designer, combining his many artistic talents to help his clients with branding, art direction, and more.
His website is minimalistic. On the homepage, he has gone with the two main things: a short bio and his photography and design portfolio with a few featured items. The minimal navigation bar helps visitors find more of his portfolio items, the contact form, or the primary social media profiles (Behance, Instagram, and Pinterest).
As you see on the home page of the website, Fat Choy is located in New York and mixes Chinese and Vegan flavors. They offer dine in, carry out and outdoor dining options for their customer base.
Three centered links are laid over a full-screen image which morphs in response to different cursor positions. This is an extremely visual website you can use to promote your establishment.
An image-heavy restaurant website designed to attract customers with stunning pictures of gourmet dishes. Photos are enhanced with a darkening fade effect.
The website for Houseplant is clean and minimalist, with a focus on the products themselves. The background is a pale green, with white text and green accents.
Houseplant is a California-based cannabis company founded in 2018 by Hollywood actor Seth Rogen and his business partner Evan Goldberg. The company sells a variety of cannabis products including flower, pre-rolled joints, edibles, and concentrates. Houseplant’s products are available in select dispensaries in California and Colorado.
Harper Wilde is a bra shop that is ran by women and has focused on what women really need in a bra. Backed by plenty of research, and a drive to improve the lingerie industry as a whole.
Perfect for gyms, personal trainers or any businesses focused on fitness. Striking motivational images will get customers pumped to join your classes.
Ashley Easter is an activist, speaker, author, coach, and advocate of abuse survivors. Whether it’s on stage at an event, or in a coaching session, Ashley empowers survivors of abuse to change the world.
The Soilboy company is obsessed with plants, the benefits of owning them and the care they require. Those with a green thumb will love the in depth information they provide and the plants available for purchase from the website.
One of Seattle’s top dental practices is Dental Care Seattle. Consisting of a well rounded team of 5 different dentists that offer both preventative and cosmetic services in a friendly setting.
Minaa is a mental health professional who is truly passionate about what she does. Aside from her general services, she focuses on self-care and learning tools that support a better quality of life through the guides she’s written.
Amy is a product designer at Microsoft. She delivers people-first designs and currently leads user research for Money in Excel, a Microsoft 365 solution subscribers can use to manage, track, and analyze money and spending, all in Excel.
Her UX portfolio website’s homepage is an excellent example of showcasing the most essential things top of the fold. She introduces herself and sums up her extensive career right at the top in beautiful yet clear typography. She has also added a confident picture of her interacting with her team below the intro. Overall, potential clients will know pretty much everything about the “professional Amy” as soon as they land on her website.
The next element in the website’s visual hierarchy is her top navigation bar. It includes links to the important pages (for her): About, Work, and Writing. If your aim with the website is to get clients (that’s probably not Amy’s website goal) and you’d be mimicking Amy’s website, perhaps replacing “Writing” with “Contact” or a similar CTA will be a better idea.
Just like the homepage, she showcases her case studies perfectly too. Each case study is in-depth with relevant information about the UX project. They include background, timeline, goal, success metric, problem, research, deliverables, prototyping and usability testing, and more. She also uses screenshots and videos to show her work effectively.
Minaa is a professional in the mental health field that is truly passionate about what she does. Aside from her general services, she puts a focus on self-care and learning tools that support a better quality of life.
Clean, elegant design. A great example of what you want a wedding website to be. Plus: lots of room to showcase engagement photos.
Jenny Kakoudakis is the founder of the London based interior design brand Seasons in Colour. From the website, you can find beautiful decorating ideas, tips and tricks and inspiration for any room of the home.
