Website design for architects and design studios

Almost no practice wins work from a stranger who typed “architect” into a search box. The name arrives through a former client, a structural consultant, a developer, a contractor, or a photograph seen in a journal. Then the same sequence runs every time: the person searches the practice name, opens the site on a phone that evening, and works out two things — whether you have built the kind of thing they are imagining, and whether you are anywhere near their price range. Everything else on the site is decoration.

Most studio sites make both questions hard to answer. Photographs sit in an untitled grid with no brief, no location, no built-up area, no year and no photographer credit, so a visitor cannot separate a flat renovation from an institutional campus. Fee information is absent altogether, which is why partners spend their evenings on calls with people who have not bought the plot yet.

The Architects Act and the Council of Architecture’s professional conduct regulations shape what the copy may say. Registration numbers, qualifications and a factual description of the work belong on the site; superlatives, self-praise, discount offers and anything that reads as soliciting work do not. That is a smaller restriction than it sounds. Factual writing — the brief, the constraint, the material, the consultant, the year — reads better to a serious client than adjectives ever would, and it happens to be exactly what a journal editor needs when your work is being considered for publication.

The project page is the unit the whole site is built from, so we fix its shape first and then fill it in with your material.

• A fixed project record — typology, city and state, plot and built-up area, year, status, client type and a brief in two or three paragraphs, so every project reads consistently.
• Drawings beside the photographs — site plan, key floor plans, one section and a detail, published as SVG or clean line PNG so they stay sharp when someone pinches in on a phone.
• Credits handled properly — the photographer’s credit line on every image set, structural, MEP, landscape and contractor credits at the foot of the page, licence terms stored in the admin.
• A filtered index across residential, commercial, institutional and interiors, with year, scale and status filters that work without reloading the page.
• An image pipeline that takes your 40 MB originals and serves AVIF and WebP at five widths with a blurred placeholder, capping the largest delivered file at 2400 px.
• A practice page with partner profiles, Council of Architecture registration numbers, degrees, teaching and jury work, and a short factual note on how the studio runs.
• Process and fees by stage — concept, design development, working drawings, tender and site services — with a plain statement that the fee is a percentage of project cost and where the stage payments fall.
• An enquiry form that filters on site location, plot or carpet area, project stage (land bought, drawings pending, sanction in hand), an indicative budget band and start date, delivered to WhatsApp and email.
• Press, awards and publications with dates and outbound links, plus a press kit of logo, partner portrait and three high-resolution credited images per project.
• Careers and internships with open roles and a portfolio upload field that accepts a 20 MB PDF, which keeps the office inbox clear.
• A studio journal for competition entries, site notes, lectures and material experiments — the section that gives the site something to say between completions.

All of it sits on a build we control end to end, so the archive can grow to two hundred projects without a page builder dragging the pages down. It is the same web development service we run for any other client, tuned here for image weight.

Two honest things before you spend. First, a practice in its first year, with the work coming from one developer relationship, does not need SEO yet. A ₹24,999 site with six properly written project pages does the job, and the rest of the budget is better spent on photography, which outlives the website. Second, for a phrase like “interior designers near me” you will not out-rank Houzz, Justdial and the aggregator listicles, and chasing it wastes money. What you can own completely is your own name: the practice name should return your site, your Business Profile, your Instagram and your journal profiles with nothing confusing in between. After that come the long, specific phrases the work itself produces — a courtyard house in laterite, a school block in exposed concrete, a retrofit inside a listed building. Those live in the project text, which is one more reason the brief gets written rather than skipped.

Then the part nobody plans for. A project finished in March that appears on the site in November tells every visitor the practice has gone quiet. Photography arrives in bursts a few weeks after a shoot, so schedule the update around the shoot, not around handover. Name one person — usually the youngest architect in the office — give them an admin where every field is labelled (brief, areas, credits, drawing set, images) rather than a free-form page builder, and each project takes about twenty minutes. If nobody in the office has twenty minutes, take the care plan at ₹1,499 a month, send us the folder and the credit sheet, and we do it.