Design practices build the best-looking websites in any industry and, with striking regularity, the least effective ones. A site can win a design award and still send its owner no work at all, because the qualities being judged and the qualities that produce an enquiry are only loosely related.
This is not an argument for uglier websites. It is an argument for briefing the build against what the site has to accomplish.
What a design practice's website has to do
Four things: prove the standard of the work, demonstrate relevance to this visitor's specific project, answer the questions that stop people enquiring, and make the enquiry easy. A site that does the first and none of the others is a portfolio, not a business asset.
The second is the one most often missing. A prospective client with a Federation semi in Marrickville and a heritage constraint is not asking whether you are talented; they are asking whether you have done this. Relevance is what a beautiful, undifferentiated grid of images cannot communicate.
Why beautiful design websites generate nothing
Because the conventions of the genre remove exactly the elements that convert: text, structure, navigation cues and an obvious next step.
A splash page with no purpose. A full-screen image and a scroll prompt delays every visitor and tells search engines nothing about the page.
Portfolio as one endless grid. Thirty projects sharing one URL is one page competing for one search, and it forces the visitor to do the sorting.
No text anywhere. If the only description of a project is set inside a JPEG, then neither a screen reader, nor a search engine, nor a client using the site's own search can tell the project exists.
Hidden or minimal navigation. A hamburger menu on desktop is a choice to make the site harder to browse in exchange for a cleaner header.
Contact as an afterthought. A single “Contact” page with an email address is a request that the visitor do the work of composing an enquiry from scratch.
No answer to the obvious questions. What does an engagement cost, roughly how does it work, what stages are there, do you work in my area. Silence on these does not create intrigue; it creates a reason to enquire elsewhere.
Project pages are the unit of the site
Build the site around individual project pages rather than around a gallery. Each project is a separate page, with a descriptive URL, real text, and its own enquiry prompt.
This is simultaneously the strongest conversion decision and the strongest SEO decision available, which is unusual — the two disciplines usually trade against each other. A project page lets a visitor recognise their own situation in your work, and lets a search engine understand that your practice has done a rear extension on a Californian bungalow in Camberwell. Both audiences want the same thing: specificity.
A project page should carry the brief, the constraints, the scope you took responsibility for, the consultants and trades you coordinated, the location and property type, alt text on every image, and a link to enquire about something similar. Where the project went through an approval process, say so — that is information clients search for, and we have covered the approval pathways behind design enquiries separately.
The SEO pillar goes further into how these pages earn visibility.
Designing the enquiry path
Give every page a next step, and make the enquiry form ask about the project rather than merely collecting a name.
The path should be visible from wherever the visitor is: an enquiry prompt at the end of a project page, a persistent way to contact you in the header, a phone number that dials on a mobile. Practices frequently place a single call to action at the bottom of a long homepage and then wonder why the deepest-engaged visitors — the ones reading project pages — never reach it.
On the form itself, resist the instinct to minimise. For a considered, high-value service, a form that asks about project type, suburb, property type, approvals and timing filters out browsers and arrives pre-qualified. It also lets you reply specifically, which is what earns the first meeting. The full argument is in the lead generation pillar.
That form collects personal information, so the Privacy Act 1988 applies. Australian Privacy Principle 5 expects a collection notice at the point of collection and Australian Privacy Principle 1 expects a real privacy policy — and if you also want to send a newsletter, the Spam Act 2003 requires consent for that separately, as we set out in our Spam Act and Privacy Act guide.
Speed on an image-heavy site
Serve every image at the size it is actually displayed, in a modern format, and load only what is on screen. Almost all portfolio slowness is image weight, not code.
The mechanism matters because it points at the fix. A browser must download, decode and paint the largest visible element before the page feels loaded; on a design site that element is nearly always a hero photograph. Uploading a full-resolution file straight from the photographer and letting the browser scale it down means the visitor pays for every pixel they never see. Responsive image sets, modern formats, sensible compression and lazy loading of below-the-fold images address the great majority of it.
Two cautions. Lazy loading applied to the hero image delays the very thing being measured. And galleries that only render their contents after a script runs can hide the entire portfolio from a crawler — a fast site nobody can index is not an improvement.
Mobile is the site most of your prospects see
Design and build for a phone first, because that is where a homeowner researches a renovation in the evening, and because Google evaluates the mobile version of your site.
Tap targets and spacing. Fine typography and tight spacing that reads as refined on a large display becomes unusable at arm's length.
Contact on mobile. A tappable phone number and a form that works with a mobile keyboard. Test it on a real device, not a resized browser window.
Image weight on mobile data. A visitor on a train is not going to wait for a desktop-sized hero image.
Horizontal galleries. Swipe interactions that fight the browser's own scrolling frustrate people and frequently cannot be operated any other way.
Accessibility is an obligation, not a refinement
The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 is Commonwealth law applying to the provision of goods, services and facilities, and Australian guidance has long treated that as extending to the web, with Level AA of WCAG 2.1 as the working benchmark.
Design portfolios are unusually exposed, because the aesthetic conventions of the profession and the accessibility requirements point in opposite directions. WCAG 2.1 requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text and user-interface components; pale grey on white, the house style of the entire industry, routinely fails both. Text baked into images cannot be resized or read aloud. Custom lightboxes frequently cannot be operated by keyboard. Scroll-triggered content can be unreachable.
The compensation is that nearly every fix is also a search fix — alt text, heading structure, real text, keyboard-operable navigation. We have written a fuller account of what accessibility requires of Australian design practices. A practice that designs for people has a difficult argument to make from an inaccessible website, and accessibility conformance appears routinely in government and institutional procurement.
Build the SEO in rather than adding it later
Structure is cheap during a build and expensive afterwards. Get the URLs, headings, metadata and structured data right the first time.
Descriptive, stable URLs. A project URL that names the project outlives the gallery software it was built in.
Unique title and meta description per page. Duplicated metadata across a portfolio is the most common fault on design sites and among the easiest to avoid.
One H1, ordered headings. Headings chosen for meaning, not for size.
Structured data. LocalBusiness for the practice, Article for insights, FAQPage for question blocks.
A content management system the practice can actually use. A site that requires a developer to publish a project is a site that stops being updated.
Redirects planned before launch. A rebuild that changes every URL without redirects discards whatever visibility the old site had earned.
The pages the site has to carry
Beyond the portfolio, an Australian practice's site needs a privacy policy that reflects what it actually collects, terms that describe how enquiries are handled, and copy about the practice that survives a reading of the Australian Consumer Law and the state Architects Acts.
That last point deserves attention at build time rather than at review time, because the exposure sits in the fields a developer fills in without thinking: page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text and the site name in structured data are all public representations, and they are the places a protected title most often survives an otherwise careful edit. Our notes on protected titles and on consumer law claims cover what to check.
What to brief a developer
Individual project pages, not a single gallery. With a template that includes text fields for brief, constraints and scope.
A conversion path on every template. Not one call to action on the homepage.
Responsive images and modern formats as a requirement. With a stated performance target the build has to meet.
WCAG 2.1 Level AA as an acceptance criterion. Written into the brief, tested before sign-off, including keyboard-only operation.
Editable metadata on every page. Titles, descriptions, alt text and structured data the practice controls.
A redirect map if this replaces an existing site. Old URL to new URL, for every page that had traffic.
Our website development service page describes how we approach these builds, and the digital marketing pillar explains where the website sits among the other channels. More writing for Australian practices is in Insights, and you can read about the practice on our about page.