Websites for the Win: Four Home Pages
WordPress.com is for blogging right? Right — but it’s also for websites of any kind, as these four polished pages ably demonstrate.
We love blogs, but we love websites, too. Small businesses, personal portfolios, non-profit organizations, government websites — bring ’em on! These four sites are each beautiful, effective, and built on WordPress.com.
Sandyfoot Farm
Purple carrots, green grass, red tomatoes — rather than clashing, the images on Sandyfoot Farm’s site suggest abundance and health. Popular free theme Sela is the perfect backdrop for these Virginia farmers’ vibrant vegetables.
Sela‘s built-in “front page” template gives them space for a welcome note and and three areas highlighting key elements of their business like farmers’ market appearances, farm shares, and their farm blog. The theme’s default sans-serif font plays well with the Sandyfoot logo and keeps things feeling streamlined, even amidst a riot of color.
Only in the Peg
Ever thought about visiting Winnipeg, Canada? You will after seeing Only in the Peg, the adorable online showcase the city’s tourism board built using the premium Adventure theme. While the site retains a blog-style layout, its use of featured posts, widgets, and a menu create a home page feel.
Replacing the theme’s stock adventure travel images with retro-mod patterns and a trio of cartoon clothespegs — Mister, Missus, and Lil’ Peg — gives the site a fun, family-friendly vibe. We especially love the punch of orange in the site’s logo, and shadow of Winnipeg’s skyline spanning the header. Next stop, Manitoba!
Trina Lambert
Even we are hard pressed to tell what theme graphic designer Trina Lambert uses for her personal site — pared down and bold, it puts all the focus on her, where it belongs. (Hint: it’s Clean Home, a free blog theme.)
Clean Home already features bold text against a crisp white backdrop; Trina takes that a step further, removing the theme’s standard red title text and creating a stripped-down home page with a few well-placed graphics. It’s an eye-catching presentation that gives visitors an immediate sense of her style.
Leading Change
New Zealand’s Leading Change is a network of social entrepreneurs committed to fostering social and environmental change. On their website, they lead the charge using the free theme Edin.
Edin is tailor-made for business and organizational sites. Leading Change makes the theme their own with an engaging image layered with their mission statement. Swapping out Edin‘s chunkier fonts for lighter, leaner Futura keeps things modern, in line with the organization’s forward-looking stance.
From themes like Goran, Creative Portfolio, or Swell designed with websites in mind to malleable blog-style themes like Twenty Twelve and Oxygen, WordPress.com lets you go beyond the blog. Free themes and tools allow anyone to build a professional site quickly and easily, and add-ons like premium themes or the WordPress.com Business plan, mean the sky’s the limit.
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Thanks. I want to monetize my site. Does that mean I can sell prints through Zazzle or CaféPress from this, my domain?
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You can’t sell from Zazzle or CafePress directly off your site — folks will still have to go to those sites to do the actual purchasing — but you can certainly link to your Zazzle/CafePress pages, include images of your prints, etc. For anything you might want to sell directly, the WordPress.com Business plan lets you embed an actual store on your site.
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Thanks
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Really interesting. Made me realise just how much can be built with wordpress.
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I love wordpress.com and these sites are very cool ;D
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Gorgeous blog selections. I especially love Sandyfoot Farm. Out-of-the-box creative and most unexpected for a farm. How savvy! 😀 I feel a little ashamed of my blog’s creativity limits… and it’s not my theme’s fault for sure XD
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Don’t sell yourself short 🙂
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That’s exactly the one I was eyeing!
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Can you put the upgrades to half price for 1 day only? I love WordPress 😀
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I’m afraid the free trials are the best I can do. (But we love you, too!)
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Indeed beautiful websites! I knew WordPress had some amazing website templates bup never fully explored them until I began developing one for myself. Then a graphic designer-cum-developer suggested a few links. That’s when I came across the mag theme.. and with a bit of tweaking I launched a brilliant eZine with exactly the design that I had in mind.
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Our point: wordpress.com is becoming a truly capable platform for building sites for small businesses. When you reach a certain level of skills, you can do magic! But there are still things to improve in terms of SEO and e-Commerce. No one is perfect 😉
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Some great suggestion here. I’ll definitely try to implement some aesthetic changes.
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I really love building websites on wordpress. I have now used several different systems and wordpress is a joy to use over every other one I have built a site on. Thanks!!!!!!!
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Great to hear! You’re very welcome 🙂
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wow. clean home is great. is it responsive too? i wanna give it a try
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It’s not, unfortunately; it’s a great theme, but an older one. It’s also a fairly simple and clean theme, and there are many newer, responsive themes that you could use as the foundation to achieve the same kind of look.
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Great Blog Post 🙂 Very helpful to small businesses.
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Although I am happy with the themes I have for my three WordPress websites, I enjoyed seeing the four home pages in your post. On your part, the themes were well represented and clearly described briefly. On the owners’ part, their use of the themes were definitely enhanced with their creative tweaks. Nice to see what can be done with a WordPress website.
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Just shows how creative people can be on WordPress. Amazing looking home pages.
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Gorgeous blog selections 😉
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Beautiful websites & clever portrayal……spells awesome! What I mean is that the owners of the websites have cleverly showcased their work using these stunning themes. Creativity on wordpress has definitely raised the bar.
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Those ARE great themes, but when I saw the headline “Only in the Peg” I thought I was finally getting my own spot on the WordPress homepage. Sigh.
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Sorry for the bait-and-switch 😉
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Definitely going to rework my own site now!
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I have been eyeing Sela for a while now, but am unsure how to make the switch while my site is live. Sela has the functionality I’m looking for, and your example here with Sandyfoot Farms is a real inspiration. I’ll have to figure this one out, and soon! Thanks for the inspiration.
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You mention that Clean Home isn’t responsive, but that there are newer, very similar, themes that are. Would you name a few, please? Thanks.
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A quick search reveals 93 responsive themes in the Theme Showcase.
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