We’ve seen many pushing the boundaries as well as adopting trends in web design but most importantly embracing and supporting the new Joomla 1.6/1.7 release.
This list of templates is a personal list of favourites that we found to push design forward for Joomla as well as being inspirational. Hopefully these will also be inspirational to all other Joomla designers.
Peter Bui's Picks for 2011
This template, Momentum, by Rocketheme makes fantastic use of Javascript throughout and the large background image slider on the website really captures the user at first glance. Very well designed template and I absolutely love it. This is my top pick for 2011.
JA Travel by Joomlart is a very well designed travel / hotel website. Everything has been thought of and integrated into the template quite well. Joomlart have implemented a perfect template for anyone looking at building and customising their own travel website.
This template by JoomlaBamboo called Reponsive actually embraces it's name. Responsive design is one of the latest web trends which adapts a website to the users viewing devices. JoomlaBamboo are really pushing the responsive design in their templates and have done a fantastic job of it. Hence I have choosen Responsive as one of our favourite templates for 2011.
This is a beautiful template by YooTheme called The Big Easy. It boasts beautiful image layout and content blocks perfect for a blog or small magazine. Careful attention to image overlays, smooth image scrollers and the overall layout. I can see some interesting influences from some popular Tumblr templates.
Having designed and built many charity websites I found this one an excellent and inspirational design to really connect and convey a message from a charity to their target audiences. The use of texture, typography and illustrated elements throughout the website are just fantastic and very well done. Shape5 have done really well with this design.
Martian Kocian's Picks for 2011
I love this design by YooTheme! Beautiful use of typography in the website, subtle drop shadows, great use of the menu system from the Zoo Framework and very well laid out template. Perfect for an app developer website but can very easily be adapted for many other uses. I found that this one from YooTheme stood out brilliantly from their showcase of templates.
The thing that drew me to Gravity by Themexpert was the use of colour in the design of the template. Careful attention has been applied to various parts of the layout.
JA Portfolio by Joomlart is just a perfectly designed website for a real estate portfolio or real estate agent website. Careful attention to all aspects of a real estate site have been looked at from large slide shows, property search modules and also has a interesting property display showcase. Wonderfully pieced together!
A clean cut website that allows the designer to really showcase products on a website clearly. Rocketheme once again have carefully balanced the use of AJAX and creative design in this template. Overall just simple and elegant.
This is one of the later templates from Gavik and I thought the images and layout was very appropriate for this type of website. Use of images, layout, typography and great integration with K2 is why I've chosen Game Magazine as one of my best picks for 2011.
What Do You Think?
So these are the templates that we have selected, now its over to you. Share your favourite Joomla templates of 2011.
