27 of the Best Website Designs to Inspire You in 2019

Every once in a while, I'll come across a website that really draws me in. So, I found 27 of them to show you.

These sites push the boundaries of what is known to be possible on the web. Whether it's the design aesthetic, usability, interactivity, sound design, or value that the site provides, each one is a masterpiece in its respective industry, and something to be inspired by.

Not surprisingly, many organizations exist to highlight these sites and the contributions they make to the web. To help surface some of the most inspirational designs, I gathered 21 award-winners that have made their way through several key awards organizations -- including Awwwards, UX Awards, The Webby Awards, SiteInspire, Best Website Gallery, and FWA.

Click the links below to jump to a group of website designs that crushed it in the last several years:

• Best Website Designs from 2014 – 2015
• Best Website Designs from 2016
• Best Website Designs from 2017
• Best Website Designs from 2018

Below this list, I also found six more websites whose homepage designs are just plain cool and worth learning from.

As you browse through the list, know that each site excels in its own way and seeks to serve a unique purpose. While one site may be an excellent example of visual design, another may be an excellent example of interactivity. This means that not all of these sites may be "conversion machines" or blueprint ideas that you can easily copy over to your site.

Rather, they're great ways to gain some website design inspiration and see the cutting-edge marketing that's happening in the different corners of the web.

Best Website Designs

1. Virgin America
2. Feed
3. ETQ
4. Mikiya Kobayashi
5. The History of Climate Change
6. Beagle
7. Woven Magazine
8. JOHO’s Bean
9. World of SWISS
10. Rainforest Guardians
11. Protest Sportswear
12. The Teacher’s Guild
13. Inside Abbey Road
14. Simply Chocolate
15. NOWNESS
16. Citrix: The New Mobile Workforce
17. crypton.trading
18. Southwest: Heart of Travel
19. Reductress
20. Overflow
21. Frans Hals Museum
22. Minimums
23. MovieMark
24. Guillaume Tomasi
25. The District
26. Tej Chauhan
27. Amanda Martocchio Architecture

Beautiful Award-Winning Websites

And the awards go to ...

Best Website Designs from 2014 – 2015

1. Virgin America

Award: Most Significant Industry Evolution, 2014 UX Awards

In a world where airline websites are known to be riddled with major usability issues, Virgin America has one of the best websites that pushes usability, accessibility, and responsive design forward. In fact, it's been named as the first truly responsive airline website, a new precedent in the industry.

Featured by UX Awards

2. Feed

Award: Site of the Day (6/6/2015), Awwwards

Not only is Feed an interesting concept, but it also has a stunning execution that challenges our understanding of what is possible on the web. Through a creative blend of animation and video, the site immerses the user into a very engaging experience. As an atypical site, it contains several unique usability elements as well, including a navigation that doubles as a scroll progress bar.

Featured by Awwwards

3. ETQ

Award: Site of the Day (5/19/2015), Awwwards

ETQ takes a very minimalistic approach to ecommerce with their stripped-down site with big, compelling visuals of their product. Simple, flat, color-based backgrounds accompanied by strong typography help to keep the focus on exactly what the user came there to see: shoes.

Featured by Awwwards

4. Mikiya Kobayashi

Award: Site of the Day (7/4/2015), Awwwards

Mikiya is a Product Designer with a minimalistic portfolio that showcases his work through strong photography and subtle animations. His full site was originally created in Japanese and then translated into English, helping demonstrate the international scalability of his design.

Featured by Awwwards

5. The History of Climate Change

Award: Site of the Day (6/23/2015), Awwwards

Follow the footsteps of Luc Jacquet as Wild-Touch takes you along this visual and educational journey about the history of global climate change. A mixture of historical media and unique animations help tell the story.

Featured by Awwwards

6. Beagle

Award: Site of the Day (4/19/2015), Best Website Gallery

Beagle does an exceptional job of visually and progressively telling the story of their product in a simple and easy-to-digest way. This is a major challenge for many startups, especially when they're introducing new concepts to existing markets. People want to know, "What is your product? How does it work? Why do I care?" Beagle answers all those questions while simultaneously showing off their product and compelling the user to purchase. Plus, they're one of few sites that actually implemented "scroll hijacking" correctly.

Featured by Best Website Gallery

7. Woven Magazine

Award: Site of the Day (4/4/2015), Best Website Gallery

Woven is an online publication that celebrates artists, craftsmen, and makers alike. To me, they represent a confirmation that publications can (and should) have beautiful, engaging sites with easy-to-read content. Free of distractions like pop-ups and obtrusive ads, this site all about the experience of the content itself.

Featured by Best Website Gallery

8. JOHO's Bean

Award: FWA of the Day (8/7/2015), Favorite Website Awards

The website for JOHO's Bean has incredible imagery, interactivity, story telling, visual design, and most of all, sound engineering. These all come together to create a compelling, emotional, and engaging site that tells the story of a coffee bean's journey.

Featured by FWA

9. World of SWISS

Award: Best User Interface, 2015 Webby Awards

Another airline?! What is happening?! Yep, SWISS airlines built an incredibly immersive site that tells their story and describes what it's like to fly with them -- and they simply did too great of a job to be ignored. Strong visuals and animations introduce the user to different sections of the site that are packed with information beyond the usual sales and marketing pitch that is so common today.

Featured by The Webby Awards

Best Website Designs from 2016

10. Rainforest Guardians

Award: Best Activism Website, 2016 Webby Awards

Rainforest Guardians became one of the most immersive nonprofit websites of 2016. Seeking to build awareness around deforestation, the site allows users to "visit" the various villages, natives, and waterways that make up the Amazon Rainforest. The site puts interactivity at the center of its user experience -- a wise choice if your goal is 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 calls Protest Sportswear a "shoppable look book," and that's exactly what this site is. As a clothing outfitter, this website has reinvented the way they market their product: Rather than promoting garments of clothing, Protest Sportswear promotes "looks." This makes the company's product the most appealing part of the website itself, using a collage of styles to design a homepage that changes as often as its customer's styles do.

Featured by Awwwards

12. The Teacher's Guild

Award: Best Association Website, 2016 Webby Awards

The Teacher's Guild is a professional community of educators whose website publishes content that addresses today's most critical challenges in education. What makes this website award-winning is how it balances diverse content types -- programs, solutions, approaches, and collaborations -- without overwhelming its visitors. Not only are its background visuals prominently placed, but they also use white space to emphasize the written calls to action at the center, as shown in the screenshot below.

Featured by The Webby Awards

13. Inside Abbey Road

Award: Best Music Website, 2016 Webby Awards

Google knocked it out of the park with this highly interactive site, which allows users to step into the Abbey Road Studios. Brilliant sound design, navigation mechanics, and visuals mixed with the usual "Google flair" all help draw visitors in to this well-made web property.

Featured by The Webby Awards

Best Website Designs from 2017

14. Simply Chocolate

Award: Site of the Year (2017), Awwwards

You'll get a craving for chocolate just looking at this website -- and in a way, that's Simply Chocolate's website working as designed.

This appetizing website is that of a Denmark chocolate maker named Simply Chocolate. Its website uses a variety of colors (and creative product names) to promote each chocolate bar. And as you scroll from one product to the next, they all seem to remain consistent in brand. The three-dimensional appearance of each chocolate bar makes you feel like you can grab it off of your computer screen, while the "Add to Box" CTA to the top-left is ideally placed for users to select the products they want while browsing.

Featured by Awwwards

15. NOWNESS

Award: Best Cultural Blog/Website, 2017 Webby Awards

Nowness is perhaps the coolest crowdsourced video blog on the internet today. That was a mouthful ... what does all that mean?

NOWNESS's "crowdsourced" nature is part of what makes it an award-winner. This means most of its content comes from independent creatives -- an increasingly popular way for businesses to publish content. NOWNESS is also a video blog, meaning all of its blog content is in video format. Together, these qualities help make Nowness a captivating hub for the stories that brands everywhere strive to tell.

Featured by The Webby Awards

16. Citrix: The New Mobile Workforce

Award: Site of the Day (11/23/2017), 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 site owned by Citrix, uses panoramic photography to show visitors how Citrix is supporting Red Bull Racing's new race car. Even if you're not a car-racing enthusiast, the website's clever animations to explain a complicated automotive technology are hard to ignore.

Featured by Best Website Gallery

Best Website Designs from 2018

17. crypton.trading

Award: Site of the Day (4/3/2018), Awwwards

Meet crypton.trading, your robot accountant.

Crypton.trading is a trading hub for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, using artificial intelligence to predict changes in a currency's value and identify key buying and selling opportunities. The website was rated high for its development and design, as it gradually explains more of the developer's methods the further down visitors scroll.

This award-winning website makes tech-savvy visitors feel right at home the moment Crypton's greeting appears across the homepage, one letter at a time.

Featured by Awwwards

18. Southwest: Heart of Travel

Award: Best Visual Design - Aesthetic, 2018 Webby Awards

When Southwest Airlines wanted to prove its customers were "more than just a dollar sign," the company created a website whose design was assembled using the shapes of their customers' flightpaths.

The website, called Heart of Travel, even allows visitors to create their own artwork out of a trip they might plan on taking. In this way, Southwest's website is a product of their most loyal passengers.

Featured by The Webby Awards

19. Reductress

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. But it is hard to do it consistently for a large audience. Reductress is a satirical magazine whose headlines and general reading experience are top-tier in the humor department -- making the website itself a quality property.

Featured by The Webby Awards

20. Overflow

Award: Site of the Day (3/20/2018), Best Website Gallery

Overflow is a design tool that allows people and businesses to create story-like flow diagrams of their ideas so they're easier for others to understand. Aside from this being just a good service, the Overflow website practices what it preaches: Along with vibrant red call-to-action buttons for downloading the tool, this website promotes its product the best way it knows how -- using a flow diagram.

The website delivers this flow diagram in the form of a video. And while embedded videos can look rather clunky sitting in the middle of a website's other design elements, Overflow's is perfectly placed and exactly what you'd want to see when landing on the site for the first time.

Featured by Best Website Gallery

21. Frans Hals Museum

Award: Site of the Year (2018), Awwwards

It can be tough for a museum, whose brand is predicated on a variety of incredible artwork, to bring it all together on a cohesive website. That's what makes the website of the Frans Hals Museum so impressive.

Located in the Netherlands, this museum has created a website that uses a combination of digital design elements and its own exhibits. This mixture helps visitors understand what they'll see, when they can see it, and where else they can get a taste of what this museum has to offer. Speaking of the latter, the museum promotes its Instagram account directly on its homepage -- a brilliant move for a museum looking to expand its audience across its online channels.

Featured by Awwwards

Other Cool Website Designs

22. Minimums

Minimums takes a very bold approach to the way that they display their content, leveraging a grid-based website design, big typography, and full-width, high-quality images. Their site serves as a really nice example for how to properly execute a grid structure while still maintaining a nice visual hierarchy in the design.

23. MovieMark

MovieMark is a growth marketing agency and HubSpot Partner, whose website is covered head to toe in the service it offers: digital storytelling. Located in Colombia, the agency makes video a core focus of its brand, so it's only fitting that MovieMark's website follows this theme. And oh, how visually pleasing the videos on its website are ...

24. Guillaume Tomasi

As a Photographer in Montreal, Guillaume Tomasi has built a portfolio that's truly fit to house his unique and awe-inspiring photography. His surreal photo style is juxtaposed by his simple, flat, empty, and minimalistic portfolio design that places all of the focus on the work itself.

His unique series navigation coupled with art-gallery-inspired work introductions and perfect scrolling interactions yield an experience reminiscent of that of a real gallery.

25. The District

This branding agency takes its imagery seriously, and it should -- it handles all channels of media for their clients. The District's website, alone, is a journey through some of the most beautiful artwork and photography you've ever seen.

These provocative tiles change rapidly as you explore the website, and the wackier they seem, the more interested you become in learning about their past work.

26. Tej Chauhan

Tej Chauhan has turned impressionist artwork into a business model with this intriguing website. Each image on this product developer's homepage slides out to cover the previous image, offering little context around the object you now see in front of you.

But isn't that lack of context exactly what makes you want to learn more? The tagline, "Souvenirs of The Near Future," suggests these objects are a part of their product line -- and an opportunity for you to get these innovative objects into your life.

27. Amanda Martocchio Architecture

An architecture firm might not specialize in web development, but its website should still demonstrate its commitment to visually pleasing design. Amanda Martocchio took that to heart with this gorgeous website.

It's no secret that Amanda Martocchio Architecture loves its work -- each picture on the homepage of its website is an enchanting shot of the houses the company designs. The website labels every house you scroll through with the type of design that was intended, along with numerous angles to each building.

Want more website design examples? Check out these amazing product pages you'll want to copy immediately.

http://bit.ly/2rMGETV

Checkout on Instagram and Sponsored Stories Polling Stickers

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we explore Instagram’s new in-app checkout and polling in sponsored stories with our special guest, Rebekah Radice. Watch the […]

The post Checkout on Instagram and Sponsored Stories Polling Stickers appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

March 30, 2019 at 11:00AM http://bit.ly/2uBxNFm
read more...
from Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner http://bit.ly/2I1z28M
via IFTTT

An Introduction to Brand Dilution, Extensions, and Cannibalization

You might know Cadbury for their high-end chocolate and candy, but did you know they sold instant mashed potatoes from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s?

Image Credit: Geek Goes Vintage

Smash, their instant mashed potato brand, surprisingly reached mainstream success. But, unfortunately, it was at the expense of lowering their flagship product’s perceived quality.

Cadbury is a premium confectionery company, so when they started producing low-end food products, like instant mashed potatoes, it’s not shocking to learn that their association with the finest chocolates weakened. Eventually, in 1986, Cadbury sold Smash, only 20 years after they introduced their instant mashed potatoes to the world.

Cadbury’s expansion into instant mashed potatoes created a new revenue stream and even generated more sales for them, but it damaged their brand as a whole. This phenomena is called brand dilution, and, below, we’ll dive into it, as well as other related concepts called brand extensions and brand cannibalization.

Brand Dilution

Brand dilution is when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in, like Reese’s Puff Cereal or Gerber’s baby clothes.

Brand Extension

Companies leverage their existing brand awareness and equity to develop brand extensions that create new revenue streams. However, an unsuccessful brand extension, like Zippo’s perfume for women or Samsonite’s outerwear, can attach undesirable associations to their brand, weaken its existing associations, and hurt its established products’ perceived quality, which can all lead to brand dilution.

When does brand dilution occur?

According to two marketing professors from Dartmouth College and UCLA, brand dilution usually occurs when a company’s failed brand extension is closely related to their flagship product -- consumers will start questioning the company’s expertise and dedication to quality within their main product category.

On the other hand, when a company develops a brand extension that’s unrelated to their flagship product, consumers will expect differences in the extension and distance it from the brand’s main product category, leading to significantly less brand dilution if the extension fails.

Amongst a company’s most loyal customers, however, an unrelated brand extension can lead to brand dilution because they have a deeper understanding of the company’s brand identity. So even if the unrelated brand extension is successful and attracts new customers, the company’s most loyal customers may feel like the unrelated extension is inauthentic, causing them to think less of the brand.

Brand Dilution Examples

Pillsbury's Frozen Microwave Popcorn (Closely Related Brand Extension)

Image Credit: YouTube

Even though Pillsbury is known for producing foodstuffs, their frozen microwave popcorn couldn’t compete with Orville Redenbacher or General Mills’ Pop Secret because their product positioning of being “frozen for freshness” didn’t offer enough value. Sure, sticking your popcorn in the freezer is convenient (I guess), but that benefit pales in comparison to enjoying a better-tasting popcorn, and it diluted Pillsbury's brand equity. 

Levi’s Tailored Classics (Unrelated Brand Extension)

Image Credit: Pinterest

When Levi’s introduced their Tailored Classics in the early 1980s, they already owned a large share of their target market, so they wanted to enter some new markets to sustain their high growth rate.

One of these markets was men’s suits, but since their brand was heavily associated with a casual, rugged, and outdoorsy lifestyle, Levi’s new product line conflicted with their core identity and failed to catch on.

Consumers trusted Levi’s to produce durable clothing that could endure the wrath of mother nature, but, for that very reason, they didn't trust them to produce high-end tailored suits, leading to a loss of trust in their brand as a whole. 

Brand Cannibalization

Brand cannibalization is when a company develops a brand extension that competes with one of its established products and takes a portion of its market share. Even though brand cannibalization sounds like a counter-intuitive business strategy, companies do it because they think their new product’s sales will be greater than their older product’s loss in sales, leading to a boost in total revenue.

For instance, when Apple released the iPad, the original Macintosh’s sales decreased, but the iPad’s sales were greater than the Macintosh’s loss in sales, so Apple actually grew their total revenue. However, brand cannibalization can also backfire, prompting customers to purchase the new product instead of the older product, leading to a stagnation or decrease in the company’s total revenue.

Extending your brand can be a double-edged sword.

Every business wants to capture as much market share as possible. But before you start developing a brand extension, make sure you truly understand your brand’s core identity and, more importantly, make sure you stick to it. Because if you don’t, you could release a brand extension worse than Eva Longoria’s Steakhouse for Women, wreaking havoc on your brand as a whole and diminishing your total revenue.

http://bit.ly/2FBHoBh

What Is Semi-Structured Data?

To consider what semi-structured data is, let's start with an analogy -- interviewing.

Let's say you're conducting a semi-structured interview. This, as the name implies, falls somewhere in-between a structured and unstructured interview.

For context, a structured interview is one in which the questions being asked, as well as the order in which they are asked, is pre-determined by your HR team and consistent for each candidate. An unstructured interview, on the other hand, is one in which the questions, and the order in which they are asked, is up to the discretion of the interviewer -- and could be entirely different for each candidate.

When you consider these two extremes, you can begin to see the benefits of semi-structured interviews, which are fairly consistent and quantitative (like a structured interview), but still provide the interviewer with a window for building rapport, and asking follow-up questions.

Semi-structured data is similar in nature to a semi-structured interview -- it's not as messy and uncontrolled as unstructured data, but not as rigid and readily quantifiable as structured data.

What Is Semi Structured Data

Semi-structured data is information that does not reside in a relational database or any other data table, but nonetheless has some organizational properties to make it easier to analyze, such as semantic tags. A good example of semi-structured data is HTML code, which doesn't restrict the amount of information you want to collect in a document, but still enforces hierarchy via semantic elements.

Here, we're going to explore the difference between structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data to ensure you have a good understanding of the terms.

Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured Data

Structured data is known as quantitative data, and is objective facts and numbers that analytics software can collect -- this type of data is easy to export, store, and organize in a database such as Excel or SQL. Structured data is valuable because you can gain insights into overarching trends by running the data through data analysis methods, such as regression analysis and pivot tables.

Here's an example of structured data in an excel sheet:

Alternatively, semi-structured data does not conform to relational databases such as Excel or SQL, but nonetheless contains some level of organization through semantic elements like tags. For instance, consider HTML, which does not restrict the amount of information you can collect in a document, but enforces a certain hierarchy:

This is a good example of semi-structured data. As you can see, HTML is organized through code, but it's not easily extractable into a database, and you can't use traditional data analytics methods to gain insights.

Finally, unstructured data -- otherwise known as qualitative data. When it comes to marketing, unstructured data is any opinion or comment you might collect about your brand. While what your consumers are saying is undeniably important, you can't easily extract meaningful analytical data from those messages.

An example of unstructured data includes email responses, like this one:

Take a look at Unstructured Data Vs. Structured Data: A 3-Minute Rundown for more clarification on structured vs. unstructured data.

Semi Structured Data Examples

1. Email
2. CSV, XML and JSON documents
3. NoSQL databases
4. HTML
5. Electronic data interchange (EDI)
6. RDF

http://bit.ly/2uxCrEj

Is Facebook Organic Marketing Dead?

Have recent changes to Facebook impacted your marketing? Wondering what you should and shouldn’t be doing with your organic Facebook marketing? To explore Facebook organic marketing, I interview Mari Smith. Mari is a consultant for Facebook, and the leading expert on Facebook marketing. She’s also the author of The New Relationship Marketing: How to Build […]

The post Is Facebook Organic Marketing Dead? appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

March 29, 2019 at 11:00AM http://bit.ly/2JPHLxr
read more...
from Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner http://bit.ly/2Ugjx3y
via IFTTT

The Beginner's Guide to Editing YouTube Videos

As a video marketer, editing might be the most important part of post-production. If you can’t seamlessly weave your shots together or get your cut to hit the right frame, your video will seem unpolished and disengage your viewers.

That said, if you’re operating on a shoestring budget, you might not be able to afford video editing software. So what’s a video marketer to do without editing software? Fortunately, YouTube offers a web-based video editor that is completely free and accessible through its platform.

YouTube’s video editor is an extremely basic editing tool, but it can still let you trim clips out of any part of your video, so read on to learn how to chop up your videos right in the video platform.

How to Use YouTube's Video Editor

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio

 

2. On the left side bar, click “Videos”

3. In “Uploads”, click the thumbnail of the video you want to edit.

4. In the left sidebar, click “Editor”.

5. Trim the beginning or end of your video.

If you want to trim the beginning or end of your video, select “Trim”, which is right next to your video’s timer and right above your timeline panel.

Next, you’ll see a blue and white line on the sides of your timeline panel. Drag them to chop off parts of the beginning or end of your rough cut that you don’t want to include in your final version. Click “Preview” to view your edited video, and if it looks good, press “Save”.

6. Trim clips out of the middle of your video.

If you want to trim a certain clip out of the middle of your video, select “Trim”. Next,in your timeline panel, click the beginning of the clip that you’d like to trim out and press “Split”

Then, in your timeline panel, click the end of the clip that you’d like to trim out  and press “Split” again.

Finally, click on the blue line at either the beginning or end of your clip and drag it to the other side to trim it out of your video. Click “Preview” to view your edited video, and if it looks good, press “Save”.

7. Add an End Screen to your video.

If you want to give your viewers the option to watch a related video, playlist, or subscribe to your channel at the end of your video, click “ADD AN END SCREEN” in your timeline panel.

You can either create an End Screen from scratch or choose from five End Screen templates.

http://bit.ly/2uyNE7S