Less Than 5 Steps to Research WordPress Websites and Finding Inspiration to Design Your Own

We all want to be original nowadays, especially when creating a personal or business website. Nevertheless, because WordPress has to maintain an "easy to use for everyone" interface, using this platform to create a site can sometimes result in something generic and simply unexciting to look at. There are, however, ways to avoid this.

There are always two sides to any argument, so by this rule, anything can work to your advantage as long as you find the right angle of approach.

Take choosing a theme for your blog, for example. You don't have to be super-original and completely unprecedented in order to design an excellent, user-friendly website to host all your creative potential.

Let's investigate some convenient tips on how to go about picking the right theme for your WordPress blog or any other type of website you might be thinking of creating. Simply keep the following points in mind and you will soon have a nicely designed website for your visitors to look at and enjoy.

Learning by example is key

Watch, observe and interact with the best-designed websites out there. By doing this, you will access all the brilliant ideas those creators had when designing the sites. By simply using your observational skills, and maintaining a productive state of mind.

The key elements to take into account when analyzing a WordPress website are:

Initial visual impact

You have to think like any visitor to this website would. What's the first thing that catches your eye?

Note the colors in use on the website and how they complement each other. You shouldn't choose too many colors, and the shades you do decide to go with should go together to create the feeling you are looking for.

It has been proven that colors can influence the way we feel when we are looking at them. Many extremely successful websites, like Twitter and Google, have been implementing these principles, with great success, for many years. Now it's your turn. Trust your senses and see how different nuances, levels of saturation and various shades can affect your opinion about the site you're visiting.

The overall website structure

The most important content on the page should always be well highlighted. Take that into account and also take a look at where the ads are placed. What about the sidebars? Every structural detail should be analyzed so as to make a general idea about what works best.

Plugins

Popup plugins are the easiest to recognize, but there are other, extremely useful plugins around, meant to significantly help you out with various little time-consuming tasks, such as forms, SEO, analytics and more.

Some plugins may just be used to bring a little extra something to the design, like snowflakes during the winter for example, but others can really save your website from becoming slow or unresponsive.

Your main concern should be to take note of this sort of details and observe as much as you can about the various styles you find appealing.

Use an online theme detector

After you've done your research, it's extremely simple to find out what WordPress theme a website is using; so simple in fact, it could be summarized in 5 simple steps, maybe even less.

1. Copy the URL of the WordPress website you admire.



2. Go to the WhoisWP.com homepage.



3. Paste the link you copied in the search box.



4. Press the Search button and wait a nanosecond.



5. It's already over. I guess we didn't need this step after all.

Voila! Now you can see the information you required arranged in a useful list, complete with the theme's version, author's name and the active plugins used on the website.

The more the merrier

It is always a good idea to look on as many sites as possible, in order to let yourself be influenced by a lot of different ideas. If not, your site will end up looking flavorless and like a copy of someone else's, which we don't want.

Experiment outside of the box

By sticking to only one kind of website, you are limiting your creative potential, so go out there and look at websites that have nothing to do with the niche you are targeting.

Anything goes when it comes to creativity and design can be whatever you want it to be, as long as you are mindful of how it will be received by your potential clients.

Making your own design is fun

There are various pros and cons to making this decision, depending on your goals, budget and time.

First of all, while CSS and HTML might appear intimidating at first, if you do your research well enough, there are a lot of useful things to learn which can really benefit you, in the long run. Plus, there are many things you can intuitively manage on your own, like installing plugins and adding configurations to preexisting templates.

Even though you will still probably have to purchase your template or a plugin or two, the overall cost of doing everything yourself will be significantly lower than hiring a pro to design your WordPress website for you. If you enjoy learning new things, it will be a lot of fun, so don't worry about what can go wrong, you can still hire someone in the end, if you change your mind or if the process gets too overwhelming for you to carry on.

Hopefully, this article's tips have provided a good starting point for your website designing plan of action. By reflecting on them, good results are sure to follow, so enjoy exploring new creative opportunities!