No one knows better than WordPressers, the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into a really groundbreaking website.
WP Engine in collaboration with the Webby’s looked to highlight some of the most beautiful and well-made sites on WordPress in the second annual Crafted with Code. The project aims to look at the stories and people behind the websites.
All of the sites showcased below are powered by WordPress.
Nylon
The iconic magazine Nylon got a facelift from agency Code and Theory. The magazine covers all things entertainment, fashion, and culture, and the website needed to reflect that. According to the team behind the site, “Our design brings to life grungy textures, graphical references like music festival posters, hand-written graphics and bold, energetic typography.”
Because Nylon made the pivot to virtual-first publication from physical copies, the website needed to be able to tell the powerful stories while also maintaining what makes readers come back month after month. Code and Theory focused on using customizable cards, allowing every story to look different but still feel like old Nylon.
Mekanism
When ad agency Mekanism approached Haus to redo their site, they wanted to exhibit the marriage of soul and science. The site needed to showcase Mekanism’s clients while also maintaining the culture and personality of the company.
According to Haus, this was done by “We created fairly detailed Figma prototypes that showed a lot of interaction, animations, and transitions — mainly to sell through design concepts to the client, but also to make sure that our UX approach was sound in thinking through how the average user would navigate the site.”
Mekanism wanted much more control over design elements. This was done using headless Contentful for the backend and Next.js for the frontend. This allowed for the information hierarchy to make sense well also integrating fun animation and graphics.
Verizon Fortnite Stadium
Fortnite is arguably one of the biggest games in the world, and Verizon teamed up with R/GA Momentum Worldwide to bring players a beautiful new experience with the Fortnite Stadium. This isn’t your typical stadium, players can fight in a replica of the actual Super Bowl LV stadium. To make it more Fortnite-y, R/GA added whimsical elements such as waterfalls to a realistic rendering of the Raymond James Stadium.
Probably the coolest thing about this project is R/GA hired actual fans and players group, Team Beyond, to help with the experience. Their expertise made sure the heart and soul of Fortnite were ever-present.
Crafted with Code
These are only four examples of the powerful WordPress websites highlighted by Crafted with Code. Head over to the website to read about all the projects and get inspired to create the next big thing using WordPress.
This showcase shatters the stereotype that WordPress is a blogging platform. The universe of the web is so much bigger than that and no one knows this better than the people building and creating beautiful websites.
