Every now and then I come across a website that really attracts me. So I found 32 that I can show you.
These websites push the boundaries of what is known on the web to be possible. Whether it’s design aesthetics, usability, interactivity, sound design, or the value that the website offers, each one is a masterpiece in its respective industry and something to draw inspiration from.
Unsurprisingly, there are many organizations highlighting these websites and their contributions to the web. I’ve gathered to discover some of the most inspiring designs 32 award winners These have found their way through several major award organizations – including Awwwards, UX Awards, The Webby Awards, SiteInspire, Best Website Gallery and FWA.
Click the links below to be taken to a group of website designs that have destroyed them in recent years:
Under this list I also found six other websites their homepage designs are just plain cool and worth learning from.
As you scroll through the list, you should know that each site stands out in its own way and aims to serve a unique purpose. While one site can be a great example of visual design, another can be a great example of interactivity. This means that not all of these websites may be “conversion machines” or blueprint ideas that you can easily copy onto your website.
Rather, they are a great way to get inspiration from website design and see the innovative marketing that is happening in different corners of the web.
Best website designs
- Virgin America
- Lining
- ETQ
- Mikiya Kobayashi
- The history of climate change
- beagle
- Woven magazine
- JOHO’s bean
- World of SWITZERLAND
- Rainforest Guardian
- Protest sportswear
- The teachers’ guild
- On Abbey Road
- Simply chocolate
- NOWNESS
- Citrix: The new mobile workforce
- crypton.trading
- Southwest: the heart of travel
- Reduction woman
- Overflow
- Frans Hals Museum
- Minimum requirements
- The Octopus: Design Blog by IDEO
- Nomadic tribe
- MovieMark
- Guillaume Tomasi
- The quarter
- Tej Chauhan
- Amanda Martocchio architecture
- The quarter
- Tej Chauhan
- Amanda Martocchio architecture
Beautiful award winning websites
And the awards go to …
Best Website Designs of 2014-2015
1. Virgin America
Award: Most important industry development, UX Awards 2014
In a world where airline websites are known to be fraught with major usability issues, Virgin America has one of the best websites that drives usability, accessibility, and responsive design. In fact, it has been dubbed the first truly responsive airline website, setting new precedent in the industry.
Marked by UX Awards
2. Feed
Award: Site of the Day (06/06/2015), Awwwards
Not only is Feed an interesting concept, it also offers impressive execution that challenges our understanding of what the web can do. With a creative mix of animation and video, the site immerses the user in a very engaging experience. As an atypical site, it also contains several unique usability elements, including a navigation that doubles as a scrolling progress bar.
Featured by Awwwards
3. ETQ
Award: Site of the Day (05/19/2015), Awwwards
ETQ takes a very minimalist approach to e-commerce with its stripped-down website with large, compelling visual displays of its product. Simple, flat, color-based backgrounds, accompanied by strong typography, help to keep the focus on exactly what the user saw there: shoes.
Featured by Awwwards
4. Mikiya Kobayashi
Award: Site of the Day (04/07/2015), Awwwards
Mikiya is a product designer with a minimalist portfolio that shows his work through strong photography and subtle animation. Its full website was originally created in Japanese and then translated into English to demonstrate the international scalability of its design.
Featured by Awwwards
5. The history of climate change
Award: Site of the Day (23/06/2015), Awwwards
Follow in the footsteps of Luc Jacquet as Wild-Touch takes you on this visual and educational journey through the history of global climate change. A mix of historical media and unique animation helps to tell the story.
Featured by Awwwards
6. Beagle
Award: Site of the Day (April 19, 2015), Best Website Gallery
Beagle does an exceptional job of telling the story of their product, visually and step-by-step, in a simple and easy-to-digest way. This is a major challenge for many startups, especially when introducing new concepts into existing markets. People want to know, “What is your product? How does it work? Why do I care?” Beagle answers all of these questions while showing their product and forcing the user to buy. Plus, they’re one of the few sites that actually implemented scroll hijacking correctly.
Featured by Best Website Gallery
7. Woven magazine
Award: Site of the Day (04/04/2015), Best Website Gallery
Woven is an online publication that celebrates artists, craftsmen and makers alike. To me, they’re an endorsement that publishing can (and should) have beautiful, engaging websites with easy-to-read content. Free of distractions like popups and intrusive ads, this website is all about experiencing the content.
Featured by Best Website Gallery
8. JOHO’s Bean
Award: FWA of the day (08/07/2015), Favorite Website Awards
The website for JOHO’s Bean features incredible imagery, interactivity, storytelling, visual design, and most importantly, sound engineering. All of this adds up to a compelling, emotional, and engaging website that tells the story of a coffee bean’s journey.
Marked by FWA
9. The world of SWISS
Award: Best User Interface, Webby Awards 2015
Another airline ?! What’s happening?! Yes, SWISS Airlines have created an incredibly impressive website that tells their story and describes what it’s like to fly with them – and they have just done too good a job to be ignored. Powerful graphics and animations introduce the user to different areas of the website that are filled with information beyond the sales and marketing pitch that is common today.
Featured by the Webby Awards
Best Website Designs of 2016
10. Rainforest Guard
Award: Best Activism Website, 2016 Webby Awards
Rainforest Guardians became one of the most comprehensive non-profit websites of 2016. To raise awareness of deforestation, users can “visit” the various villages, indigenous and waterways of the Amazon rainforest. The website puts interactivity at the heart of its user experience – a smart choice if you want to get people to connect with your cause and convert into volunteers.
Featured by the Webby Awards
11. Protest sportswear
Award: Site of the Year (2016), Awwwards
The Awwwards call Protest Sportswear a “shop-in lookbook,” and that is exactly this page. As a clothing store, this website has reinvented the way they market their product: instead of promoting clothing, Protest Sportswear promotes “looks”. This makes the company’s product the most attractive part of the website itself. It uses a collage of styles to design a homepage that changes as often as its customers’ styles.
Featured by Awwwards
12. The Teachers’ Guild
Award: Best Association Website, Webby Awards 2016
The Teacher’s Guild is a professional community of educators whose website publishes content that addresses key challenges in education today. What makes this website award-winning is the balance between different types of content – programs, solutions, approaches, and collaborations – without overwhelming visitors. Not only are the wallpapers prominently placed, but they also use spaces to highlight the written calls-to-action in the center, as shown in the screenshot below.
Featured by the Webby Awards
13. On Abbey Road
Award: Best Music Website, 2016 Webby Awards
Google kicked it out of the park with this highly interactive website that allows users to enter Abbey Road Studios. Brilliant sound design, navigation mechanics and graphics, mixed with the usual “Google flair”, draw visitors to this well-made web property.
Featured by the Webby Awards
Best Website Designs of 2017
14. Simply chocolate
Award: Site of the Year (2017), Awwwards
If you look at this website, you’re going to get chocolate cravings – and in some ways Simply Chocolate’s website is working as planned.
This appetizing website is that of a Danish chocolate manufacturer called Simply Chocolate. The website uses a variety of colors (and creative product names) to advertise each candy bar. And when you scroll from one product to the next, all brands seem to stay consistent. The three-dimensional appearance of each chocolate bar makes you feel like you can take it off your computer screen, while the “Add to Box” CTA at the top left is great for users to select the products they want while browsing.
Featured by Awwwards
15. NOWNESS
Award: Best Cultural Blog / Website, Webby Awards 2017
Nowness is perhaps the coolest crowdsourced video blog out there today. That was a sip … what does it all mean?
NOWNESS’s “crowdsourcing” nature is part of what makes it an award winner. This means that most of the content comes from independent creators – an increasingly popular way for companies to publish content. NOWNESS is also a video blog, meaning all blog content is in video format. Together, these qualities make Nowness a fascinating hub for the stories brands everywhere want to tell.
Featured by the Webby Awards
16. Citrix: The new mobile workforce
Award: Site of the Day (23/11/2017), Best Website Gallery
This website, dedicated to Red Bull’s partnership with Citrix, a cloud-based software company, is amazing.
The New Mobile Workforce, a Citrix website, uses panoramic photography to show visitors how Citrix supports Red Bull Racing’s new racing car. Even if you’re not a racing fanatic, the website’s clever animations explaining a complicated automotive technology are hard to ignore.
Featured by Best Website Gallery
Best Website Designs of 2018
17. crypton.trading
Award: Site of the Day (4/3/2018), Awwwards
Meet crypton.trading, your robot accountant.
Crypton.trading is a trading center for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin that uses artificial intelligence to predict changes in the value of a currency and identify key buying and selling opportunities. The website has been rated high for its development and design as it gradually explains more of the developer’s methods the further down visitors scroll down.
Tech-savvy visitors feel at home on this award-winning website as soon as Crypton’s greeting appears letter by letter on the homepage.
Featured by Awwwards
18. Southwest: Heart of Travel
Award: Best Visual Design – Aesthetics, Webby Awards 2018
When Southwest Airlines wanted to prove that its customers were “more than just a dollar sign,” the company created a website that was designed based on their customers’ flight paths.
The Heart of Travel website even allows visitors to create their own artwork from a trip they may be planning. In this way, the Southwest website is a product of its most loyal passengers.
Featured by the Webby Awards
19. Reduction woman
Award: Best Humor Website, 2018 Webby Awards
It’s not that hard to make someone laugh on the internet. So much of what we read and consume online is meant to be entertaining. However, it is difficult for a large audience to do this consistently. Reductress is a satirical magazine whose headlines and general reading experience are top priorities in the humor department – which makes the website itself a quality item.
Featured by the Webby Awards
20. Overflow
Award: Site of the Day (03/20/2008), Best Website Gallery
Overflow is a design tool that enables people and companies to create story-like flowcharts of their ideas so that others can more easily understand them. Aside from being just a good service, the Overflow website practices what it preaches: In addition to bright red call-to-action buttons to download the tool, this website is promoting their product to the best of its ability – using a flowchart .
The website provides this flowchart in the form of a video. And while embedded videos can look pretty clunky amidst a website’s other design elements, Overflow is perfectly placed and exactly what you want to see when you first land on the website.
Featured by Best Website Gallery
21. Frans Hals Museum
Award: Site of the Year (2018), Awwwards
It can be difficult for a museum whose brand is based on a variety of incredible works of art to bring it all together on one cohesive website. This is what makes the Frans Hals Museum website so impressive.
This museum in the Netherlands has created a website that uses a combination of digital design elements and its own exhibits. This mix helps visitors understand what they are going to see, when to see it, and where else to get a taste of what this museum has to offer. Speaking of the latter, the museum is promoting its Instagram account directly on its homepage – a great step for a museum looking to expand its audience through its online channels.
Featured by Awwwards
Award winning designs of 2019
22nd 1917: In the trenches
Award: Awwwards best website of the day
This website, which aims to promote the 1917 film, allows you to walk through the trenches and complete the same mission that the characters in the film did. You can also view their maps or access other tools.
This is a great example of a website that does. went way beyond that with interactivity and a website that uses its own content and pre-written storyline to market their film. This website has been named Site of the Day by Awwwards, which allows designers to vote and nominate great websites they see every day.
23. The Octopus: A design blog from IDEO
Award: Business Blog / Website 2019 Webby Award
IDEO, a global design company, won the Business Blog / Website 2019 Webby Award for his Octopus blog, and for good reason. The blog features an elegant black and white octopus drawing as its homepage design and uses yellow, black, and white to create a cohesive theme as you scroll.
Hovering over a blog post will highlight the title in yellow, and hover over an image and hover the image towards you – two little features that make a big difference in creating a unique one create an engaging user experience.
24. Nomad tribe
Award: Nomination for Awwwards Website of the Year
This site, nominated for Awwards’ Page of the Year, is one of the most interesting sites I’ve seen. The homepage immediately starts playing a breathtaking video of a man walking through a desert, followed by beautiful landscape scenes and text such as “Are you lucky enough to call yourself an adventurer?”
The text throughout the website is playful, with bright pinks, oranges and yellows, and the homepage is designed in a logical way. CTAs are placed in this area in the commitment level from “Read More” to “Watch Now” and finally “Download the” app. “Ultimately, the website is beautifully designed with great attention to detail and consistently tells a convincing story.
25. Diana Danieli
Award: Webby 2019
This website, won by Webby in 2019, features images of art and architecture with high contrast or exposure. As a website visitor, you can click and drag the mouse to change the photos and variations. Each image shows a work that highlights the artist who owns the website.
26. George Nakashima Woodworkers
Award: Webby 2019
Other cool website designs
27. Minimum requirements
Minimums takes a very bold approach to displaying their content, using a grid-based website design, large typography, and high quality full-width images. Your site is a really good example of how a grid structure can run properly while maintaining a nice visual hierarchy in the design.
28. MovieMark
MovieMark is a growth marketing agency and HubSpot partner whose website is covered from head to toe by the service it offers: digital storytelling. The Colombia-based agency makes video a central theme of its brand. So it is only fitting that MovieMark’s website should follow this topic. And oh how engaging the videos are on his website …
29. Guillaume Tomasi
As a photographer in Montreal, Guillaume Tomasi has put together a portfolio that really suits his unique and impressive photography. His surreal photo style contrasts with his simple, flat, empty and minimalist portfolio design, which focuses entirely on the work itself.
Seine einzigartige Seriennavigation, gepaart mit von der Kunstgalerie inspirierten Arbeitseinführungen und perfekten Bildlaufinteraktionen, ergibt ein Erlebnis, das an das einer echten Galerie erinnert.
30th. Das Viertel
Diese Markenagentur nimmt ihre Bilder ernst und sollte – sie verwaltet alle Medienkanäle für ihre Kunden. Allein die Website des Distrikts ist eine Reise durch einige der schönsten Kunstwerke und Fotografien, die Sie je gesehen haben.
Diese provokanten Kacheln ändern sich schnell, wenn Sie die Website erkunden. Je verrückter sie erscheinen, desto mehr interessieren Sie sich für ihre früheren Arbeiten.
31. Tej Chauhan
Tej Chauhan hat mit dieser faszinierenden Website impressionistische Kunstwerke zu einem Geschäftsmodell gemacht. Jedes Bild auf der Homepage dieses Produktentwicklers wird herausgezogen, um das vorherige Bild abzudecken, und bietet wenig Kontext um das Objekt, das Sie jetzt vor sich sehen.
Aber ist das nicht genau der Mangel an Kontext, der Sie dazu bringt, mehr zu lernen? Der Slogan “Souvenirs of The Near Future” weist darauf hin, dass diese Objekte Teil ihrer Produktlinie sind – und eine Gelegenheit für Sie, diese innovativen Objekte in Ihr Leben zu bringen.
32. Amanda Martocchio Architektur
Ein Architekturbüro ist möglicherweise nicht auf Webentwicklung spezialisiert, aber seine Website sollte dennoch sein Engagement für ein optisch ansprechendes Design demonstrieren. Amanda Martocchio hat sich das mit dieser wunderschönen Website zu Herzen genommen.
Es ist kein Geheimnis, dass Amanda Martocchio Architecture ihre Arbeit liebt – jedes Bild auf der Homepage seiner Website ist eine bezaubernde Aufnahme der Häuser, die das Unternehmen entwirft. Die Website kennzeichnet jedes Haus, durch das Sie scrollen, mit der Art des beabsichtigten Designs sowie zahlreichen Winkeln zu jedem Gebäude.
Website-Design-Ideen
Nachdem Sie eine Reihe wunderschön gestalteter und preisgekrönter Plattformen gesehen haben, sollten Sie diese potenziellen Ideen berücksichtigen, wenn Sie Ihre eigenen erstellen.
- Consider ways that you can make your website interactive, like the 1917 example.
- Make a website that emphasizes the mobile experience, even while it still has a good UX on desktops.
- Create a website that tells a story about your brand with photos, text, or video.
- If you can’t create a heavily interactive site, consider drawing in eyes with a site that presents a slideshow of your photos.
- Ensure your call-to-actions are easy to see, and encourage visitors to continue exploring your site
- Keep navigation clean. Ensure your visitors always know how to get back to the homepage.
- Integrate your social media sites via social embed buttons, so site visitors can easily follow you on your various social channels.
- Keep each of your web pages consistent in design — including font, colors, images, and messaging.
- Test your website’s usability with a heat map, which will show you on which web pages your visitors are most likely to bounce.
- Include a live chat or chatbot to give visitors the option to engage with you directly on your website if they prefer live chat to phone calls. Live chat can automate functions for your sales and service reps and create a better communication experience for the customer.
- Get an SSL certificate to ensure your website is secure. SSL is part of Google’s search ranking algorithm, so an SSL certificate can help you rank higher in search.
Want more website design examples? Check out these amazing product pages you’ll want to copy immediately.
