There’s no template to follow when it comes to building the perfect website, and by that I mean websites that win awards for their UX/UI features, innovation, animation or for just being beautiful to look at.
But what separates a truly exceptional website from one that merely ticks the boxes? We put the question to two of our own developers, George Baggaley and Jordan Ross, and asked them to share the sites that made their eyes light up.
Think beyond the template
For George, award-winning web design starts with the courage to throw out the rulebook entirely.
“So much of what we see online is templated thinking,” he says. “Header, nav links, hero image, scroll. There’s nothing wrong with it functionally, but it’s forgettable. The sites that stay with me are the ones where someone clearly asked: why does it have to work like this?”
His first pick is steven.com, the operating system platform for the creator economy. What caught his eye wasn’t the content but the navigation itself, which is built to resemble a camera lens. Click a section, and you move through the lens aperture rather than jumping to a new page.
“It’s completely different to any navigation I’ve seen before,” George explains. “Instead of plonking a few links in the header, they’ve reimagined the whole journey. The lens isn’t just decorative either. When you click through, you go into it. The metaphor carries all the way through.”
His second nomination takes a similarly bold approach to storytelling. Madar Platform is a logistics technology company whose website takes users on a literal road trip. Scrolling doesn’t push you down the page in the conventional sense. Instead, it drives you along a route travelled by one of Madar’s lorries.
“It tells the story of what the platform actually does,” says George. “The scroll becomes the product. That’s clever, purposeful design. You understand the business just by experiencing the navigation.”
The website as an experience, not a document
Jordan Ross thinks about websites differently from most. For him, the conversation isn’t really about design trends at all. It’s about what the web could become.
“I think we’re approaching a point where the best websites won’t feel like websites,” he says. “They’ll feel like experiences. Something closer to a game or an interactive film than a traditional web page.”
His first example, igloo.inc, is the site for a Web3 community company, and it’s one of the most immersive digital experiences you’ll find in a browser. Sound design, animation and interaction are layered together in a way that rewards exploration rather than just consumption.
“It takes everything we imagine a website to be and turns it on its head,” Jordan says. “The sound effects alone are spot on. It’s not a website you read. It’s a website you inhabit.”
Jordan believes this points to where things are heading. “An effective website of the future will hit the right balance between immersion and information delivery in a fully interactive way. We may not even be building in HTML for much longer. Something more akin to a game engine feels like a natural direction.”
His second pick is more grounded in what’s achievable today but no less impressive for it. The Lando Norris personal site, which won Awwwards Site of the Day, takes the Formula 1 driver’s existing brand identity and builds a web experience around it with real craft.
“The animations are slick, the branding is worked into every detail, and there’s a lot of very satisfying mouse interaction,” Jordan explains. “Great photography helps too, but it’s the cohesion that sets it apart. Everything serves the brand. Nothing is there for the sake of it.”
What ties it all together
Four very different websites. Four very different industries. But the thread running through each of them is consistent: a willingness to ask what a website could be, rather than defaulting to what a website usually is.
Whether that’s reimagining navigation as a camera lens, turning a scroll into a logistics journey, building sound into a brand experience or choreographing animation around a world-class athlete’s identity, the award-winning approach is always intentional.
The best websites don’t just present information. They create a feeling. And the gap between those two things is exactly where great digital work lives.
If you’ve got the ambition, we’ve got the capabilities to evolve your website into something more.