Is It Or Is It Not WordPress

There are millions of WordPress powered bloggers scattered across the internet. With this amount of sites using the same publishing platform, there are bound to be a number of them which look the same. Whether it be in terms of layout, colors, or overall design. As it stands, the majority of your WordPress powered sites have the same 2,3 column layouts with sidebars. This post will highlight at least 10 sites that are powered by WordPress but yet, look nothing like your typical blog.

Ford Auto Shows

First out of the gate is the Ford Auto Shows website. This is one of the best examples that showcases what WordPress is capable of if designers would use their imagination. The site features a slick, large Flash powered header, an informative footer and navigation in more than one place.

Alpha Dog PR

AlphaDogPR has a simple yet easy to navigate design. The content is displayed in a non-traditional blog layout and presents only the information that is necessary without the clutter of comments, or third party plugins.

Trade Secret Consultants

At first glance, Trade Secret Consultants looks like a typical flash theme that could be purchased off of TemplateMonster.com. But, this site has WordPress under the hood. The site features a nice drop down menu system, excellent use of static content within the sidebar and presents information in a way that wouldn’t make me think this site was a blog.

878 Studios

878 Studios is a web design company that takes the minimal approach of using WordPress to feature their services. The site contains simple navigation, short and too the point content without anything referencing comments, not even a post date. Again, unless I’m viewing the source for this particular website, I would have no idea that they were using WP as a base.

Ghanamusic

Ghanamusic.com looks like a big media site at first glance with a heavy focus on ads. The way this site is laid out, it’s difficult to try and figure out which parts of the site are widget sidebars or not. The Widget headers on Ghanamusic are images instead of plain text. 5 points of uniqueness just for that alone.

NectarDesign

Leave it to a design company to really make a WordPress powered site look good. NectarDesign does an excellent job using the site to compliment their products. Their design is professional grade and shows no aspects that your typical blog would have. However, they are using the blogging functionality within WordPress on their blog page which still looks better than most default blog designs.

Kineda

At first glance, Kineda looks like it’s using a powerhouse CMS for their back end but you guessed it, it’s actually WordPress. The front page of Kineda looks more like your magazine layout with the exception that there are 4 articles featured in 2 rows, something I have yet to see in any magazine theme.

Pregnancyloss

Normally, I wouldn’t add any site to this list that is using a freely available WordPress theme. But, you can’t help but notice that the Fjords theme provides Pregnancyloss with a non traditional site layout. The 4 column look alone could justify as a significant change from the norm.

Ubiquitous

One thing is for sure, Ubiquitous gives you plenty to look at on the front page. The site features a heavy use of categories to display posts in various spots. Below the content are 4 areas of featured content from a particular category. The bottom of the site even contains a wide assortment of things to see and useful features.

BangBangTemort

BangBang is a Montreal alternative culture based newspaper written in French. The site contains a heaping amount of content organized in blocks. No one block holds importance over the other. It looks reminiscent of the Revolution News theme but this was custom built.

Conclusion

Yes, it is indeed possible to make WordPress look like something that it’s not, that being a blog publishing system. Most of the sites featured above use WordPress as the back end and then have a design built around the functionality that WordPress offers. NecatarDesign is an excellent example of how you can use WordPress to feature static content relevant to your company/products while still having access to the blogging functionality that comes with WordPress out of the box.

If you know of any other websites that use WordPress but don’t look like your typical WordPress powered blog, be sure to tell us about them by leaving a link in the comments.