A studio's website has one job: show the photograph before the visitor leaves.
Most do not. The average design studio site is a template carrying two seconds of load time in front of the only thing the buyer came to see. We build portfolio sites for UK interior designers that are fast, structured around the work and findable in the towns you take projects in. Inside one retainer from £1,000 a month plus VAT.
A site that shows the work, and gets found doing it
Speed you can feel. The last studio site we moved off Wix went from 729 KB and 1.94 seconds down to 178 KB and half a second. That is the difference between a visitor seeing your best room and seeing a grey rectangle. Check yours on a phone, off the office wifi, before you decide this does not apply to you.
A page for every project and every service. Each one with a single term to rank for, so your interior design page and your joinery page stop competing with each other. A studio with fifteen good projects and one gallery page has one chance to rank. The same studio with fifteen project pages has fifteen, and a prospective client can find the extension that looks like theirs.
Your photography, and nothing invented. No stock, no generated images, no filler copy. On a site whose whole job is to make the work look like work someone wants in their house, anything fake undermines the real thing next to it. We use what you have and tell you straight if there is a gap.
The numbers above come from a Harrogate design-and-build studio we rebuilt this year.
See that build in fullWhat a studio site needs that a template will not give you
Images that arrive before the visitor goes
Properly sized, modern formats, loaded in the right order so the first photograph is the first thing to appear rather than the last. This is the whole ballgame on a portfolio site and it is where template sites lose.
A page per project, written as a story
The brief, the problem, what you made, what it is like now. A gallery shows someone the result. A project page tells them what you are like to work with, which is the thing they are really deciding.
A page per service, with one keyword each
Interior design, joinery, fit-out, styling. Separate pages, separate terms. One page trying to rank for all four ranks for none of them.
An enquiry path that suits a long decision
Nobody commissions a full refurbishment from a contact form on a Tuesday night. The site needs somewhere for the person who is eighteen months out to go, not just a form for the one who is ready.
The Glide Retainer, from £1,000/mo
The build, the hosting, the SEO foundations and the local SEO sit in one fee, with no five-figure build cost to find first. Social and ads are priced separately so you can see what they cost.
See pricingStudio websites, answered
Six to ten weeks for most studios, and the thing that decides it is almost never us. It is how long the photography and the project write-ups take to gather. If your images are already sorted and named, the build is the quick part. We will give you the list of what we need on the first call so nothing waits on a folder nobody has opened.
Usually not. We use your own project photography and nothing else: no stock, no generated images. Most studios have more good photography than they think, it is just sitting on a hard drive rather than on the site. If what you have is phone shots of half-finished rooms, we will say so, and a content day costs less than you would think.
Nothing, until the weight of the page starts costing you the first impression. The last studio site we moved off Wix weighed 729 KB and took 1.94 seconds to show a photograph. The rebuild is 178 KB and half a second. The other limit is structure: a template decides how many pages you can have and how they relate, and a studio that wants a page per project and a page per service quickly runs into the edge of that.
Because two pages chasing the same phrase split the signal and neither wins. A studio site usually has an interior design page, a joinery page and a fit-out page all written around the words "interior design", so Google has to pick one and often picks the wrong one. A 21-page studio site with one term per page is unglamorous work and it is the single biggest structural fix on most of them.
Yes, and we would think about it carefully first. Embeds send people off your site to a platform where a competitor sits one scroll away. Linking out from a footer is usually the better trade: you keep the credibility signal without handing over the visit.
While you are on the retainer the site is live, hosted, maintained and improved. Three-month minimum, then 30 days notice. If you want to take the build outright there is a one-off buyout figure, agreed in writing before you start rather than invented at the point you want to go. The buyout exists specifically to kill the lock-in worry.
Websites for the studios next door
The same build, written for the buyer each one is trying to reach.
Want the feed as well as the site? Instagram for interior designers covers that half. For the whole retainer, see marketing for interior designers.
Want a site that does your work justice?
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