Websites for Landscape, Garden and Interior Design Studios: The Portfolio First
A design studio’s website is its portfolio, and the portfolio has to be seen before anything else is read. Three studios have kept their sites with us for nine to twelve years: a garden and interiors designer, an interior design studio, and a textiles and wallcoverings house. Between them they taught us what a designer’s site has to carry and what it must not.
What the site has to show
The work, large and fast. Full-width photographs that load quickly on a phone, with the project named and the place given. The site serves each photo at the size the screen needs, so a gallery of forty images does not take a minute to open. Nothing sits between the visitor and the pictures.
One line on what the studio does. Residential gardens, commercial interiors, wallcoverings to the trade: say it once, at the top, so the right people stay and the wrong people leave without wasting your time.
Where you work. The city, the region, the states or the countries, and whether you travel for projects.
The inquiry, not a form. Designers get clients by conversation. The site should make the first message easy: an email address, a short form if you want one, and a phone number if you take calls. No budget drop-down, no questionnaire.
Press and recognition, if you have it. Named, dated, linked.
The studio’s own voice. A page about the people and the way they work, in their words, with their photograph. It is the page a prospective client reads twice.
What we do for studios
Website management: the site, built or taken over, hosted on our managed servers, updated, backed up, secured, and changed when new projects come in. Adding a project is an email with photographs; we do the rest.
Optimization: being found for the kind of work you do and where you do it, and the articles that answer the questions clients ask before they call a designer.
Paid advertising rarely pays for a design studio, and we say so. If your market is an exception, PPC management explains how we test it.
Proof
Stark Design, BMID and Ascraft are linked from the live sites page, with the year each went live with us.