In continuing my discussion from my previous post about Headway Designers, a comment by MommyGeek, made me think it was time to highlight Designers that went above and beyond and made really great examples of what you can do with this awesome theme. So I took a look through Ownen Greaves post about Headway themed sites and picked the ones I thought showed great design. It wasn’t easy to pick through as there were a lot of great designs. So below are the top 10 I want to highlight here. I provided the site URL and the version of Headway so that you can see what else these great sites are doing.
Gareth Chidgey
Website: http://www.chidgey.me
Version: 1.5b (Beta?)
Antz In Your Pantz
Website: http://www.antzinyourpantz.co.uk
Version: 1.66
Location Independent
Website: http://locationindependent.com
Version: 1.7b5
three4one design
Website: http://341design.com.au
Version: 1.66
Local Joints TV
Website: http://localjoints.tv
Version: 1.66
Socially Responsible Media
Website: http://srmgroup.ca
Version: 1.66
Smart Shine Detailing
Website: http://smartshinedetailing.com
Version: 1.62
Blue Door Photography
Website: http://savannahweddingphotography.com
Version: Unavailable
clarkgriffiths
Website: http://clarkgriffiths.com
Version: 1.62
Silent Hill
Website: http://www.konami.com/shsm/blog
Version: 1.01
Hopefully these have given you an example of some sites that have been created with Headway. Here’s the link to the flickr set so you see these and the other designs I was looking at. In total there were 27. I’d like to see how many of these were created for a client and how many were created for personal use. Leave them in the comments.
Are there any that I missed? If you think I missed one, please include a link in the comments and let’s put your site to the test.
17 responses to “Great Looking Headway Designed Sites”
Hi AJ,
Thanks for including not one, but two of my sites! Getting onto a list of top sites like this means a lot to me.
There are a few more on the way too.
There are a couple of very nice ones there. The problem with localjoints.tv is that the page mainly consists of images containg text. From a search engine looking at html, there’e not a lot there – http://tinyurl.com/33cu9a3 . I guess this might be a trap that people might potentially fall into.
I think that’s a great point Gaz. SEO aware design adds a layer of complexity, but Headway does make it very easy to do – if you know what you are doing.
The sites look great Gareth!! Really glad to have you as part of the Headway community!
You do bring up a good point. 🙂 I left it in here because from a design point of view it’s better than what some people come up with. However if we were to include SEO into the mix, it’s horrible. There has to be a balance of design and SEO, IMO.
You are also bringing up another good point that I could have mentioned in my previous post. I wonder how many people that charge clients for cookie cutter sites also do anything about SEO. Do they understand it? Not to say that I’m the king of SEO, but I would like to think that I do a good enough job to get my clients started and improve from there. Headway does make this easy to start out with which is why I didn’t really bring it up.
Custom css could easily place text over the images, but for a non-coder placing text in images is the easiest option. The other pages on localjoints are fine.
Clarkgriffith.com suffers from a similar problem. Take a look at the about page. It looks fine until you realize that all of the text is actually an image – http://tinyurl.com/2et7ex4 . His ‘blog’ link then takes you to a tumblr site, which means that there is almost no text on his primary domain at all.
Obviously this isn’t a Headway problem, it’s an education problem. Once 1.7 comes out I might have to do a few tutorials myself 🙂
Probably want to make your site private until ready then, mate 😉
But yeah, SEO should always be a big part of any site design.
Hi AJ,
Thanks for this mini-portfolio, nice to see what others are doing with Headway too.
Pleasant surprise to see two sites designed by myself on there – SRM Group and SmartShine (SRM personal, SmartShine client) – thanks!
Curious on your thoughts on two other sites I put together:
Bonsai Interactive – http://bonsaiinteractive.com/ (personal business site)
Canadian Pet Connection – http://www.canadianpetconnection.com/ (client)
Cheers again!
Cheers, Danny.
Nice landing page! 🙂
Look forward to seeing what you come up with.
It’s nice because I didn’t design it 🙂
No problem Danny! I was going to try and look to see who did them, but decided I would see if they commented here first. 🙂
Re: Bonsai Interactive
– The rounded corners either look to small for such large boxes, or they were done with an image. They also don’t match the rounded corners of the pictures (on the home page). I am using Safari 5 and Chrome nightly on a Mac.
– The drop-down looks a little weird being all white. Maybe a 1px red border will help? Or maybe just a little more spacing between the “header” and the “content” so that there is no overlapping.
There’s a few other things I could pick apart if you wanted me to, but generally its a very good start. It was one I had selected as something I liked and would probably put it in the 27 that I have on Flickr.
Re: Canadian Pet Connection –
– Personally don’t like the color choices, but maybe that’s what you had to work with.
– You used two different types of Social Media Buttons, why didn’t you use the same?
– Contact form (name, email, subject) fields seem to small. Are they set to a 10px?
– Light brown text on Dark Brown background could be hard to read for people with color blindness issues, or just old eyes.
– Privacy Policy & Ordering and Security links have weird URLs but appear to be in WP/Headway.
I’m more of a fan of Bonsai than Canadian Pet Connection. I hope you don’t feel like I ripped them apart too much. There’s just some minor things you could do differently that would enhance what you’ve got.
Hi,
Keep in mind my list of sites using Headway is short, there are over 1,100 sites using Headway, and my list is updated everytime someone sends me a link or come across as site.
Personally, I think Headway Themes is THE best theme for WordPress. I think more people should venture out and try it.
Thanks for linking to my list, I will add your site to my list called, ” Sites of Interest”
Many Blessings, Owen
Hi Owen,
Of course. There’s just a ton of sites out there. I have clients I’d love to show off, but am under NDA with them or they are internal company sites. I’ve got some stuff down the pipeline that are not under NDA and I think (or hope) that there will be a surprise to some of them based on the way I’ve coded them.
Personally I don’t mind spending $67 on a theme so I can put my code on top of it. Once they realize the power of Headway they are hooked!
Not a problem linking to your list. I felt it only fair since it was what I used to do the research. Thanks for the link back!
Keep a look out for http://surfcubes.net, my Web and Mobile development company that I’m planning to launch around Sept. 1st.
No worries mate, it’s why I asked. Always good to get feedback from fresh eyes, helps on further tweaking (particularly Bonsai, which will be a work in progress).
With the CPC site, there was a dedicated colour scheme that the client was after. They liked the idea of a warm, earthy type feel, which I think we (hopefully) got 🙂
Again, cheers for the feedback and I’ll look into some of your ideas.
Hi All!
This list has been a big inspiration to me as I was just starting out with HeadWay. It was hard to imagine what I could do, until I saw someone else do it first. So inspired in part by the old look of Bonsai Interactive, I’ve created the http://www.MobileCellPhoneTracker.com.
Then after I got even better with css, I made a very cool niche site. I’m really happy with the way it turned out and I hope you guys like it too: http://www.LittleGuyLogos.com
Anyway, headway is awesome, I’m completely hooked!
Hi All!
This list has been a big inspiration to me as I was just starting out with HeadWay. It was hard to imagine what I could do, until I saw someone else do it first. So inspired in part by the old look of Bonsai Interactive, I’ve created the http://www.MobileCellPhoneTracker.com.
Then after I got even better with css, I made a very cool niche site. I’m really happy with the way it turned out and I hope you guys like it too: http://www.LittleGuyLogos.com
Anyway, headway is awesome, I’m completely hooked!