A bold interior design website beats a pretty one

A pretty website shows your taste. A bold one also says what you do, who you do it for and how to begin, and it does that on the first screen. Most interior design studios stop at taste. Six questions tell you which of the two you have.

What does a bold interior design website look like?

A bold site makes its decisions in public. It opens on one finished room at full width, with one line of text that says what the studio does and who it works for. It uses one heading font and one text font, chosen for the work rather than taken from a template. It shows six projects well instead of twenty badly.

A pretty site usually has the same parts as every other pretty site. There is a slider of five rooms, a paragraph about a love of beautiful spaces, a grid of small thumbnails and a contact form at the bottom. None of that is wrong on its own. The trouble is that a homeowner cannot tell your studio apart from the next three they open in other tabs.

Bold here has nothing to do with loud colour or animation. It means you were willing to leave things out, and willing to say in plain words which jobs you want.

Why does a pretty site leave a visitor stuck?

Because the visitor cannot work out whether you take their job. Imagine someone with a 1930s house in Haarlem who wants the whole ground floor rebuilt and furnished. They open your site and see eight lovely rooms with no captions, no location and no scope. They have no idea whether those were full renovations or two days of styling for a photo shoot.

They move on to a studio whose homepage says it does full-house renovations in Amsterdam and the Gooi, from the first plan to the last lamp. That studio may be no better than you. It just answered the question.

The same thing happens with the jobs you do not want. If your site says nothing about scope, you get asked to pick curtains for a rental flat. Naming the work you take is the cheapest filter you have, and it also makes the enquiries that do arrive easier to price. There is more on the mechanics of that in what an interior design website needs to book site visits.

What does service-led mean if you do not publish prices?

It means the site answers the practical questions a client has before they are ready to talk money. Most interior designers we speak to do not want a price list, and they are right, because the work is quoted per project. You can still be clear about everything around the price.

Four things belong on the site in your own words. The kinds of project you take, described by scope rather than by adjective. The stages of a project, from the first visit to handover, so the client can picture the year ahead. Who does what, meaning what you draw, what the contractor builds and what you buy on the client's behalf. And what happens in the first conversation, including whether it costs anything.

That last one matters more than people expect. A homeowner who has never hired a designer does not know if a first visit is free, billed, or a sales pitch. Saying it plainly removes the reason to hesitate. There is a longer version of this argument in the interior designer website that books consultations.

How do I check my own homepage?

Open your own site on your phone, as a stranger would, and answer six questions honestly. Give yourself one point for each clear yes.

The six questions

1. Can a stranger say what you do and who for, from the first screen, in one sentence? Not your philosophy. The work and the client.
2. Is there one finished room at full width, big enough to read the materials? A row of small thumbnails does not count.
3. Does the site name the scope of work you want more of? Full renovation, one room, furniture and fittings, hospitality.
4. Can someone start in under a minute? A form with three fields, or a calendar link, reachable from the first screen.
5. Does a project page tell the story in order? The brief, the house as you found it, the plan, the materials, the finished rooms.
6. Does the big photo at the top appear in about a second on a phone? Test it on mobile data, not your studio wifi.

How to read the score

Five or six points means the site is doing its job and your time is better spent on photography. Three or four means the pages are fine and the first screen is vague, which is a half-day of writing rather than a rebuild. Below three, the site is decoration, and the fastest fix is usually to rewrite the top of the homepage before touching the design.

Does bold mean a dark background?

No. Dark or white is a decision about your photographs, and either can be right. A near-black background suits evening interiors, deep colour, brass and strong contrast, because the screen stops competing with the image. A near-white background suits daylight, plaster, pale oak and linen, where the photos have a lot of soft tone that disappears against black.

What matters is choosing one and keeping it on every page. Sites that go dark on the homepage and white on the project pages feel like two different studios, and the photographs stop looking like a body of work.

Before and after images are the one place where this gets delicate, because the before photo is usually a phone snap in bad light. Keeping both frames the same size and the same crop is the honest way to show them, and the rest is in before and after presentation done honestly.

Where does speed come into this?

Your top photograph is the heaviest thing on the page, and it is also the first thing anyone judges. Google treats a page as good when the largest element on the first screen appears within 2.5 seconds for three quarters of visits, measured on real devices, which it documents in the Largest Contentful Paint guidance¹. On a phone on mobile data, that is a tight budget.

In practice it decides how heavy your opening image can be. One large photograph, saved as WebP or AVIF at the right dimensions, comfortably fits. A slider of five photographs, each exported straight from Lightroom at full size, does not, and the visitor sees a grey box while your best room loads.

This is the part most studios get wrong while trying to be generous. More pictures on the first screen makes the first screen slower, and the slow version shows fewer pictures in the end. Picking the one opening image and ordering the rest properly is the whole job, and how to photograph and order a project for the web covers how to sequence a project page.

What should I change first?

Start with one sentence at the top of the homepage that names the work and the place. Something as flat as full-house renovations and furnishing in Amsterdam and the Gooi beats anything poetic, because it answers the only question the visitor has at that moment.

Then choose the single opening photograph, replacing any slider, and have it exported at a sensible size. Then cut the enquiry form to three fields, which for most studios are the name, the address or type of property, and what they want done. Then fix the order of one project page and use it as the pattern for the rest.

That sequence takes a careful weekend if you have the photographs already, and nothing in it requires a new design. If the site cannot carry those changes, that is the point at which a rebuild is worth costing, and our page on web design for interior designers explains how we put one together.