Does your yoga website design look like this? This site was originally built in ’97 and looks like it has not been updated since. The old HTML4 template, colors and choice of fonts, as well as the very busy layout, indicates this. With the wide range of templates available today, this doesn’t have to be true for you.
Here are a few sites I like for yoga website design inspiration. I like them for various reasons. Some are well-organized, some don’t care about new visitors and really focus on their current student body, some are just beautifully done.
Yoga website design that is great for inspiration:
Yoga Bhoga: This is a very clean site which makes no mistake about its purpose. The top navigation is very clear and focuses on the most heavily visited pages, in the order of their importance. Everything a potential student needs is above the fold, visible on the screen when they land. The yoga website design is built on the WordPress TwentyTen theme. This site is 5 years old and yet timeless in its appeal.
Sunset Yoga: This yoga website design is very welcoming and fun, with a bright and cheery ‘India’ color palette. The owner has placed the most important subjects right in front of the new visitor. This site caters to yoga beginners and yoga workshops above the fold. Those are two very important keywords for any yoga site. Built on WordPress with a custom Genesis theme.
Yoga on Centre: This yoga website design is really in your face, with a large expanding slider running across the top half of the screen. What you see above the fold is the image slider and the line ‘Come with an open mind, your body will follow’. However, it is very clear in terms of its messages, geared to different yoga student levels. The inclusion of the teachers is great, because people love pictures of people. Built on WordPress with the Woocommerce PixelPress theme.
The Yoga Space: This is a little more artsy yoga website design, with a great background hand-drawn by Mette Hornung Rankin, an illustrator from Portland, Oregon, living in Copenhagen. I’m not crazy about the yoga website design organization but this works well with the art. I especially like the color palette the designer used and the different colored announcement boxes at the bottom. However, note that the background and text color choice is not especially accessible for those with vision issues. Higher contrast is easier to see and read.
Yoga Shala: I think it’s hard to use darker colors effectively on a yoga site but this design is very striking. What’s shown in the image below is pretty much what is above the fold. And it continues below with a smattering of other boxes/announcements below. These get more difficult to comprehend as you go further down the page. Sometimes, we think we need to put everything on the homepage but that really isn’t necessary. A linked title will often be sufficient to draw a reader in. This yoga website design was originally built with MediaLab’s Sitegrinder, now defunct.
Urban Yoga: Honestly, this appears quite busy but the devil is in the details. This site uses a tremendous number of different art elements. Everything appears to be hand-drawn, but the designer very cleverly employs the use of many hand-rendered fonts. One of the best things about this site is that great visual device, using the slider as a banner for events with the text on the right (where the eye naturally falls). No missing that! Bear in mind that this website requires constant replenishment of the artsy banners by a graphic artist. Custom site built on WordPress, hooked into MindBodyOnline thru Healcode.
Down Under Yoga: This site is very cool – colors and content – and lean on text. I’ve seen quite a few yoga website designs with this type of layout: some type of circular emblem/logo centered at the top, a large slider and text boxes below. This is the design du jour, based on the ‘design for mobile first’ philosophy. This site appears to be focused on attracting more advanced yoga students. There is not much here for beginners. WordPress site built on the Avada theme. Also using MindBodyOnline to process registration.
Yoga Workshop: This is one of the best combinations of artsy, touchy-feeling and clean designs I’ve come across. The logo and header, as well as the background of the navigation bar, lead you right into the beautiful slider images. This is not really a yoga studio but is a teacher’s site, someone who happened to get a great domain name that is heavily searched: yogaworkshop.com.
Jois Yoga: This yoga website design is quite slick, with a full-width slider as a background to the overhanging logo, navigation and short invitational message. This is the entire homepage. Using large images like this as a background can be very effective and emotional and you need great pictures to work with. Current students never revisit the homepage – instead they go right to the schedule page. So the homepage is set up to provide a feeling tone for people who have never been to the studio. The site doesn’t need to have all sorts of announcements on the homepage, because those notices are usually emailed directly to the student body. This WordPress site was built on Todd Motto’s HTML5 Blank WordPress Theme.
Seattle Yoga Arts: Like Sunset Yoga above, this site is quite bright and cheery, as is the studio. The image below shows the homepage above the fold. This site is hosted on Squarespace using one of their templates. Sites like Squarespace and Wix are developed for ease of use. But what makes this site really jump are the superb photographs.
There are many different considerations to keep in mind when building a yoga site. See this post for details about what a yoga site needs. As far as the look and feel go, you can see from the variety above that there are a lot of directions you can take.
Jujama says
Hey man! Great post but I really wanted to just drop a comment on your blog. Your blog has a super cool design. Is this wordpress by chance?
Hindi sign says
Dear Author Your Post is really helpful and informative for all.