Behind the Demos: How Andrei Designs Inspiro Starter Sites for WordPress Creators

When you browse the growing collection of Inspiro Starter Sites, it’s easy to see the finished layouts, typography, imagery, and polished design. What often goes unseen is the process behind creating those demos and the design decisions that make them practical for real-world websites.

To take a closer look behind the scenes, we sat down with Andrei, Product Designer at WPZOOM, who leads the design of Inspiro Starter Sites.

In this interview, he shares how each demo comes together, from researching industries and planning layouts to balancing creativity with usability, choosing the right tools, and adapting to the growing role of AI in web design.

Whether you’re building your first WordPress website or you’re simply curious about the thinking behind professionally designed starter sites, his insights offer a fascinating look into the design process.

Meet Andrei

Question: Could you tell us a little about your background and your role at WPZOOM?

Answer: Hi, my name is Andrei, and I’m a Product Designer at WPZOOM. Over my 14 years in the design field, I’ve worked on all kinds of projects, from social networks to e-commerce and business platforms. At WPZOOM, I’m in charge of everything on the design side. That includes creating starter sites, working on our main website, and designing our plugins and other WPZOOM projects.

What Makes a Great Starter Site

Question: When you’re designing a new demo, what separates a starter site that looks good from one that’s genuinely useful for customers?

Answer: A great starter site does the thinking for the user before they even open it. It’s not just about looking good in a screenshot, it’s whether someone can swap in their own logo, text, and images and have a finished-looking site in an afternoon. So I try to include every element they’ll realistically need, keep it easy to customize, and make sure it works straight out of the box without them having to rebuild half of it.

The Design Process

Question: Could you walk us through your process from the initial idea to the finished starter site?

Answer: With our starter sites, we try to cover more and more fields, from portfolio to renewable energy, from wellness to winery websites. Once the team and I choose a field or theme we want to work on, I start by researching the current situation. I don’t only look at the competition, but also at real sites that are actually in use. That way I understand better what real companies and people are trying to solve with their sites, as well as the overall vibe in the industry.

After that, I move on to building the structure of the pages and layouts, and choosing the styles: fonts, color palette, icons, and so on. When all the preparation is done, I start building the site in one of the builders we use, either the Block Editor or Elementor. In parallel, I add demo content such as copyright-free images and video. Once all the pages are created, I check the responsiveness and heading hierarchy, clean up anything unnecessary, and the starter site is ready to be published in our catalog.

Finding Inspiration

Question: What are some of the places, websites, industries, or trends you look at when brainstorming new demo concepts?

Answer: To keep a feel for the current UI pulse, I look at places that collect this kind of inspiration, such as Muzli, Siteinspire, Detail.Design, Landbook, Minimal.gallery, and Awwwards. When I’m creating a demo for a specific industry, I also look at real examples, which helps me understand everything I need to know about it.

Tools Behind the Workflow

Question: From planning and wireframing to creating and testing a finished starter site, what tools do you use most often? Are there any tools (such as Figma, Elementor, the Block Editor, or others) that have become essential to your workflow, and why?

Answer: At WPZOOM, we use Notion to plan and organize the whole demo creation flow. I also rely heavily on Figma to build mood boards for each new demo and to prepare all the styles and assets that make the demo content look better. When it comes to page builders, we use both the Block Editor and Elementor, and we often duplicate the same demo in both so users can choose whichever suits their needs.

AI and Modern Web Design

Question: AI tools have become increasingly common in web design. Have they influenced your workflow, and if so, how do you use them?

Answer: For now, I mainly use AI as a tool that helps me work faster. It helps me generate demo content and gives me ideas about structure and other details, so I treat it as a companion. I rarely try to generate whole pages with it, I sometimes find the results overdesigned, and they can be complicated to replicate in the builders we use. That said, AI is good at generating code for the Block Editor, so when I already have the final design in Figma or Elementor, it’s easier to reproduce.

Block Editor vs Elementor

Question: You’ve been building demos for both the WordPress Block Editor and Elementor. What are the biggest differences in your design process when working with each platform?

Answer: The design process stays the same for both builders. The only thing that changes is the specifics of each one. I prefer Elementor over the Block Editor, since I find the way it structures components much easier to work with. At the same time, the Block Editor has evolved in the right direction over the last few years, and once you learn its strengths and drawbacks, it becomes easier to build with.

Designing for Real Users

Question: A starter site needs to work for people with different skill levels and goals. How do you balance creativity with usability and customization flexibility?

Answer: I lean toward clean, restrained demos, and I do that on purpose. A cleaner layout is actually more forgiving for beginners, because there’s less that can visually break when they start changing things. The flexibility comes from building components that can be reused in different contexts, so an advanced user can rearrange things freely, while someone less experienced can just replace the content and still end up with something that looks intentional.

Biggest Design Challenges

Question: What’s been the most challenging starter site you’ve worked on so far, and what made it difficult?

Answer: I think design agency and portfolio starter sites are the most challenging to create, because you’re building them for fellow designers, who are a demanding audience. So I try to cover all the important details for them and make it much easier to choose and use a starter site.

Common Website Design Mistakes

Question: When looking at portfolio, business, or creative websites, what are some common design mistakes you see people making?

Answer: One of the most common mistakes I see is over-customization. It’s natural for people to change the fonts, colors, and some layouts, but sometimes they end up mixing the wrong colors or font sizes and lose the original balance of the design.

Design Trends to Watch

Question: Are there any web design trends you’re excited about right now? Are there any trends you think people should be more cautious about?

Answer: I really like the micro-interaction and motion trend. Done well, it can elevate your digital presence and make a site feel alive. The one thing I’d be cautious about is overusing it, too much motion can distract from the content instead of supporting it.

What’s Next for Inspiro

Question: What kinds of starter sites or design directions would you like to explore next for Inspiro?

Answer: With Inspiro, we always combine creative industries and business, so in the near future we want to cover more and more of both, to give our clients a wider choice.

Advice for First-Time Website Builders

Question: If you could give one piece of advice to someone building their first website with Inspiro, what would it be?

Answer: Have fun with it, but resist the urge to change everything at once. The theme is already balanced – fonts, spacing, colors all working together – so start by just adding your own content and see how it feels before you touch the design. Inspiro is flexible enough to make it truly yours and you just don’t have to do it all on day one.

Great starter sites result from thoughtful research, careful planning, and an understanding of how real people build websites.

As Andrei’s answers show, every Inspiro Starter Site is designed to give users a professional foundation that is both visually polished and easy to customize. Whether you’re launching a portfolio, a business website, or your next creative project, starting with a well-designed template lets you spend less time building from scratch and more time focusing on your own content.

We’d like to thank Andrei for taking us behind the scenes and sharing his design process. Keep an eye on the Inspiro Starter Sites library, there’s plenty more to come!