How to Build a Material Design Website
Material Design is a design language created and made popular by Google. You may have already seen it in action in many Android apps as well as on Google sites such as YouTube and Google+. Material Design websites feature grid-based layouts, responsive animations, smooth transitions, and feeling of depth using shadows.
In this post, we are presenting an extensive list of resources which can help you build Material Design websites. The assumption is that you are already familiar with the process of web design and development and are looking for resources, frameworks and templates to build websites with material look and feel. Even if you have just begun developing websites, you should be able to use the resources and frameworks listed below to develop a professional looking and responsive material design site.
Understand Material Design
Understanding the concepts of Material Design is an important step before you begin building websites in material design. To help you in this, Google has created an official site for Material Design which includes useful documentation and explanation of various material design guidelines. It also includes various tools to help you create material design color palletes, choose material icons among various other things.
If the material design guidelines overwhelm you at first, then fear not, there are many free as well as premium web design templates and frameworks available which already implement them and make your task easier.
Build a Material Design HTML Site
When building a site, you can choose to either build a static site or go with a CMS such as WordPress. If the site isn’t complex and just hosts a few pages or blog posts then building a static HTML site is a better option as you have the option to host it for free.
For building an HTML site in material design, you can take a look at these material design HTML templates for some ready-made options. We have hand-picked two of the best material design templates below:
Material Portfolio
This is a completely free material design portfolio template suitable for individuals as well as companies and startups. It has different pre-built pages such as homepage, about, contact and portfolio. The template is easily customizable and extensible using the MDL framework.
Material Style
Material style is a multi-purpose material design template which offers multiple color schemes and large variations of pre-built custom designed pages such as profile, timeline, e-commerce, forms, about us and a lot more. It also includes over 100 components in material design style to build a website.
Build a Material Design WordPress Theme
When it comes to WordPress sites, choosing one of the many Material Design WordPress themes will give your website a material design look. There are many free as well as premium WordPress themes available in material design. Below, you can find the two best material design WordPress themes:
Zephyr
Zephyr is one of the best-selling Material Design WordPress themes which includes a convenient page builder to help you build your WordPress website.
Material Design Web Frameworks (Professional Developers)
If you are a professional web designer/developer then it will be a better choice to learn a Material Design framework such as Google’s MDL or a Bootstrap based Material Design framework such as MDB and use it to build websites. These frameworks also include example pages, templates and tutorials which can help you get started with your web design project.
Top picks of Material Design frameworks by professional developers are presented below:
MDB
MD Bootstrap is the most versatile material design framework built on top of Bootstrap 4. It offers 400+ Material UI elements, 600+ Material icons, 74 CSS animations. On the site you will also find free templates and tutorials to build Material Design websites.
Material Kit
Material Kit is a premium Bootstrap UI Kit with design inspired by Google’s Material Design. It has an excellent implementation of material design concepts and provides easy to use and beautiful set of material design components. You will find over 1000 components, 11 fully-coded example pages and 7 customized plugins with this kit. PSD files and SASS files are also included with the PRO version of this kit.
Material Design Resources for Web Design
Building a Material Design website requires many additional design assets such as backgrounds, icons, color schemes etc. You can find some great free and premium resource collection of material design assets below:
- Material Design Backgrounds
- Material Design Icon packs
- Material Design Pallete
- Material Design Admin Dashboard Templates
We hope that our collection of Material Design website templates, themes and resources will help you build your own website.
