What do you need your website to do for your studio?
Show your work, certainly. But if you’re using it to attract prospective clients, there’s more to consider than which photographs to include.
Someone arrives on your website because something has interested them. Perhaps they’ve seen a project on Instagram, found you through Google or been given your name by a past client.
What happens next?
Can they understand what you offer? Can they work out whether you’re suited to their project? Have you given them a reason to enquire, and made it easy to do so?
I’ve looked through so many interior design websites where the project photos are doing almost all the work. Beautiful spaces, sometimes with a project name and location, but very little to help someone understand the studio behind them.
The visitor is left to make the connection between liking a room and hiring its designer.
Your website is part of how you bring in work
In some ways, your website has a similar role to your investment guide. It introduces your studio, explains your services and helps someone decide whether to take the conversation further.
It can begin that work before you’ve exchanged a single email, while you’re in a client meeting, on site or asleep.
That makes the content worth thinking about carefully. Your project selection, service descriptions, introduction and enquiry process all contribute to someone’s understanding of what you offer.
Even the information you leave out matters. If visitors can’t tell whether you take on their type of project, they may leave with that question unanswered.
It’s understandable that your own website gets pushed back
Client deadlines take priority. Photography takes time to organise. Writing about your own business can be difficult, and a website requires time and money that may already be committed elsewhere.
It’s easy to put up the images you have, add your contact details and plan to come back to the rest.
But your website may be where someone decides whether to approach you. It deserves the same consideration you give to other parts of your client experience.
What should a prospective client be able to find?
Before choosing layouts or uploading another project, consider the questions your website needs to answer.
Can you help with my project?
Make your services and the kinds of projects you take on easy to understand. Someone hiring a designer for the first time may not know what “full-service design” includes or whether you offer help with a single room.
A useful service description gives them enough information to recognise whether it could suit their needs.
What would working with you involve?
Give people an introduction to your process, their involvement and how a project begins.
You don’t need to document every stage. Explain enough to help someone understand what they’re enquiring about and what you would discuss together.
Why might your studio suit them?
Your approach, experience and the way you discuss your work can help someone recognise a good fit.
Be specific. If your work often involves adapting period homes for family life, explain what you consider. If you help clients make decisions throughout a renovation, describe how you support them.
These details give meaning to the finished spaces people see.
How do they take the next step?
Make the invitation to enquire easy to find. Explain what information you need and what someone can expect after submitting it.
A prospective client should be able to move from reading about a service or viewing a project to asking about their own.
What are your projects telling people?
The projects you include help shape someone’s understanding of your studio.
Take another look at yours. Are there images that no longer reflect your work? Projects you wouldn’t typically take on now? Or something you included simply because you needed more to show?
An older project may still represent your studio well. The question is whether it reflects the work you’d like to be approached for today.
If you have years of completed work, consider which projects best communicate your current services and approach. If you have a smaller portfolio, give visitors enough context to understand your contribution to each project.
A short introduction can explain what the client needed, what you were brought in to do and a decision that shaped the result.
For example, “a family kitchen renovation” tells us the project type. Explaining that the family needed somewhere to cook, supervise homework and eat together helps a prospective client recognise needs similar to their own.
Your photographs show the finished space. That context helps people understand how your work could be relevant to them.
Give your website a useful role in your studio
This week, set aside a little time to look through your website as someone who has never hired a designer.
Can they understand what you offer, whether their project might fit and how to enquire? Do the projects you’re showing support that understanding?
Choose one gap to address. It might be a service description that needs more explanation, a project that needs an introduction or an enquiry page that leaves people unsure what happens next.
This is the thinking behind my Squarespace website template for interior designers: giving you a starting point for presenting your work, introducing your services and leading visitors towards an enquiry.
You still need to decide what you want to say and which projects best represent your studio. The template gives you somewhere to bring those pieces together, without starting from scratch.
Your website can be introducing your business while you’re looking after the clients you already have. Give it the information it needs to begin that conversation.
