Web Design for Architects: Portfolio-Led Sites That Win Commissions

It's tempting to think of an architect's website as a gallery. Beautiful project after beautiful project, one after another. And the gallery matters. But the gallery on its own is a portfolio, not a website. A prospective client scrolling through images can see the buildings are good. What they can't see, and what they need to see before they'll pick up the phone, is how you got there.

The brief the client gave you. The site constraints, listed status, conservation area, awkward setback, sloping plot, tight budget. The planning story, whether it went through on delegated powers or committee, whether you took it to appeal, what the officer's initial view was. The design decisions and why you made them. What the client wanted to change halfway through and how you handled it. That's what convinces the next client that you'll handle their project with the same judgement.

So when we build a website for a practice, the project case study is the star of the site, not a bolt-on. Each case study gets its own page. Each page has room for the story as well as the images. And the site's whole structure treats the portfolio as the reason people visit, because for most architectural enquiries it is.

Most established practices do at least two of these, and some do all three. The problem is that residential clients, commercial clients and public sector clients want completely different things from your website.

A residential client is often a first-time buyer of architecture. They need reassurance that the process isn't going to be a nightmare, a rough idea of cost stages, an explanation of RIBA work stages in plain English, and photographs of finished homes that feel like homes. They read testimonials. They read your FAQ. They want to know if you'll come to site.

A commercial client is usually a repeat buyer. They know what an architect does. They want to see project sectors that match theirs, they want to see delivery on time and on budget, they want to know your team's capacity, and they want to see BIM and technical credentials. They read the case studies straight through and skip the FAQ.

A public sector client, whether it's a local authority procurement officer or a health trust estates team, needs specific things visible fast. Chartered practice status. Insurance levels. Framework experience. Case studies in the relevant sector, ideally with named public clients where non-disclosure permits. They'll close the tab if the site doesn't make those signals easy to find in the first minute.

So the navigation on a practice website that serves more than one of these audiences needs to route them cleanly. We usually structure it as a sector-led architecture: Residential, Commercial, Public, with the portfolio filterable by sector, and dedicated landing pages that speak to each audience in the register they expect. The homepage sits above all of that and does the general job of representing the practice.

Chartered Practice status with the RIBA, individual ARB registration, chartered membership of the RIBA, RIAS or RSUA for the country you're in, and CIAT membership for chartered architectural technologists are the credentials that architectural clients actually recognise. If you have them, the site should say so clearly and consistently.

We handle this in three places. First, in the footer, as a row of credential marks with the correct wording. RIBA has specific rules about how the Chartered Practice mark is used, and ARB has rules about how you describe individual registration. We use those rules rather than invent our own wording. Second, on the About page, where each named team member's ARB or RIBA membership is stated with the correct suffix. Third, in the site's structured data, so search engines see the practice's credentials as machine-readable facts and not just decorative logos.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Google's AI Overview and its "about this business" panels are increasingly driven by structured data. A practice that has correctly marked-up credentials is more likely to appear in those panels with the credentials attached. A practice that only has the logo in the footer is not.

The right website for a two-person practice doing sensitive residential work in a conservation area is not the same website as the right one for a twenty-five person practice with residential, commercial and public sector teams.

For a sole practitioner or a small residential-focused practice, the site should feel personal. The architect's name is often the brand. The About page is often the second most visited page on the site because clients want to know who they're hiring. The portfolio can be tighter, six to twelve projects, each with a strong case study. The FAQ page is worth writing properly because you're often talking to first-time buyers of architecture who have real questions about fees, stages and timeline. Enquiry forms should be short. A three-field form outperforms a fifteen-field form for a domestic client every time.

For a larger practice, the site is more institutional. There's usually a leadership team page with named directors and sector leads. There are sector landing pages. There's often a news or journal section because winning larger commissions is partly about being visible in the industry press. There's a careers section. The portfolio is deeper, twenty to fifty projects, filterable, with the strongest work at the top of each filter. Case studies often include collaborators and consultants named, because larger commissions turn on the strength of the whole team.

The engineering underneath the site changes too. A small practice can happily run on WordPress with a well-built theme. A larger practice with multiple content editors, an active journal, and case studies produced by different team members will want stronger editorial workflows, roles and permissions, and often a more structured content model. We build both. The right answer is whichever one matches how the practice actually operates.

We're Codesky, a Lincolnshire website design and digital marketing agency based in Grantham. We build websites on WordPress, coded from scratch rather than assembled from page-builder blocks, which matters for image handling, page speed, and long-term editability. We run SEO and PPC alongside where the practice wants a full growth programme. And we work with a small roster of clients on purpose, which means when you're talking about your website you're talking to the people building it.

For architectural practices specifically, we've thought hard about the tensions this page describes: visual weight versus performance, credentials versus clarity, single-audience simplicity versus multi-audience routing, and the licensing questions that come with using someone else's photography to sell your own work. We don't claim to be the only agency that thinks about this. We do claim to think about it before we start building.

Have a look at our wider industry pages if you want to compare how we approach different sectors, or head straight to the contact page to talk about your practice.