Unique Websites to Spark Your Website Design Inspiration

Tricia Lim

Designing websites can be rewarding, but there are days when you struggle with creativity. When it comes to working in a creative field such as web design and development, you might occasionally find yourself in a rut. However discouraging that may be, please remember that it’s only natural!

While it takes concentrated effort to keep up with new design trends and technologies, it pays off in the long run. Turning to other places for web design inspiration can push your creative boundaries and serve you as a valuable resource to your workflow.

There’s a ton of platforms with website designs from all over the net and across different industries and niches. Here are 8 great places to look for web design inspiration.

1. Elementor's Monthly Showcase

Every month, Elementor releases their list of websites worth highlighting. Elementor’s Monthly Showcase features the best sites across the web that are built with Elementor, which highlight their powerful, user-friendly capabilities.

Elementor’s Showcase features:

A great resource for learning from other niches – There’s always something you can learn from other creatives across different industries, fields, and niches. For example, you can borrow design ideas from a funky e-commerce site that works for your client’s creative brief, business needs, and branding.

2. Behance

Behance is a crowd favorite. As a global community-based platform, they make it easy for designers to showcase their work and connect with other creatives. Here you can find web design inspirations from a massive pool of design communities around the world.

You can expect a lot of community-curated content on Behance. Plus, it also has features like a mood board where users can explore, follow, create, and customize.

Behance features:

Great for photography, illustration, and graphic design inspiration – If you’re looking for these categories of design, you’ll find that Behance is particularly useful.
Extensive filter options for users – Their extensive filter options include creative fields (graphic design, UI/UX, web design, etc.), tools used (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc), color, location, popularity and so on.

They even have a ‘most appreciated’ filter which lets you peek at the work deemed the best of the best, all nominated and voted from the creative community themselves!

3. Awwwards

Awwwards is a professional web design and development competition body. As a globally recognized platform, they award, attract, and promote website submissions of the highest quality–those that continually push the boundaries between art and web design. To do so, they even use a scoring system which enables its users to vote for entries.

What’s special about Awwwards is their hand-picked jury where they evaluate each website based on a couple of criteria: design, usability, creativity, and content. Each is then given a score, before tallying to calculate a total score.

Awwwards’ Features:

Extensive tagging system – Each site is tagged with a combination of terms detailing different elements. You can browse for inspiration by selecting different filter tags such as categories, tags, technologies, colors, and countries.
Thorough jury voting and feedback – With each site submission, the site showcases a breakdown of each jury member’s scoring. They also feature notable highlights of the selected entry which helps you understand what made the site stand out.

4. Dribbble

If you’ve been looking around for web design inspiration, you’ve probably heard of Dribbble. Similar to Behance, Dribbble is a community based platform where designers share, grow their skills, and find design work all in one place.

Dribbble is great for gaining some inspiration across all aspects of design–in fact, you can find everything from print to web design on there. If you’re searching for inspiration on a specific aspect of design or element of your site, Dribbble is worth checking out.

Dribbble’s Features:

Effective resources for developing your skills – Many creatives turn to Dribbble to find inspiration for their projects. Because Dribbble is a great resource outside of web design, you can experiment with different styles and work to develop your design skills. For example, you’ll find a diverse variety of design elements, including icons, apps, responsive designs, and more.

5. CSS Nectar

CSS Nectar’s inspirational websites are vetted thoroughly. Each submission requires a fee of $5, so you can expect to see at least some standard of quality work on the platform. Moreover, they have a team of creatives who review each submission before it goes live. As with most of the other sites on this list, you can browse their tags by categories, colors, features (such as one page or responsive) or countries.

CSS Nectar’s Features:

Vetted Content – All website submissions are selected and reviewed by experts to filter the crème de la crème—aka the best of the best— in website design. This way, you know that these web designs are vetted and backed by credible sources.

6. Designspiration

Designpiration, as the name already suggests, is the place for design inspiration. Although it doesn’t focus on any particular form of design inspiration, it acts as a community-curated feed for designers. Much like a personal mood board for those who work in design!

Designspiration’s Features:

Content – Designspiration allows its users to save creative inspiration, colors, links, notes, and screenshots using browser extensions. It lets you build up a personal cache of websites for inspiration and adjust its feed according to your tastes.

7. Best Website Gallery

Best Website Gallery is a must see—its name literally speaks for itself. What initially started as a personal inspiration gallery for founder David Hellmann, turned into an extensive curated gallery free for all other website designers.

They boast an extensive collection of over 2,000 high-quality websites with various search tags to streamline users’ search for The One.

Best Website Gallery’s Features:

Robust tagging system – Their tagging system is based on different styles, colors, CMS, and frameworks used in the design. This can help users narrow down their search to a specific color palette that fits their client’s brand colors or even by the CMS chosen by the team.

9. Cssdesignawards

Unlike the others in this list, CSS Design Awards is an international award platform that highlights freelance designers and agencies, based on UI, UX, and other technical innovation. Here you’ll find the best of the best in UI and UX.

Get inspired for your next web design project

If you look around, there’s actually an abundant pool of design ideas from other creators and platforms online. When you find yourself feeling uninspired, it helps to explore website design examples created by other professionals. You’ll never know how it may spark your next website design project idea.

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If you still find that web design isn’t your passion and you would like to work with a group of creative web professionals, drop us a line at hello@medianetic.me. We’d love to see how we can help you achieve your business goals with an amazing, high-performing website.

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