Most architecture websites hide their best argument. The work is there, as a wall of beautiful photographs with a one word caption underneath, and a visitor who likes it still has no idea what the job involved, what it took to get planning through, or whether the practice has done anything like their own project.
Good architecture project pages do the explaining that a gallery cannot. They are the pages a prospective client reads before picking up the phone, and they are the pages Google has something to show when somebody searches for a practice in your city. We have a separate post on local SEO for architects.
Write for the client, not for the jury
A competition board and a project page have different jobs. One is read by people who already speak the language. The other is read by a couple who have outgrown their house, or a developer weighing up three practices, and neither of them knows what a "carefully considered threshold condition" is.
So write the page the way you would explain the job at a kitchen table. What did the client want. What was in the way. What you proposed. What it is like to use now that it is finished. Plain words are not a loss of seriousness; they are the reason someone trusts you enough to ask what it would cost to start.
One page per project, never one long gallery
A single Projects page with forty images is easy to build and almost useless to search. There is nothing for Google to match against "barn conversion architect" or "school extension architect", and there is no page a client can send to their partner or their board.
Give every finished project its own address on your site. Keep the main Projects page as a grid of cards that leads into them, and let each card carry the project type and the place, because those two things are what a visitor is scanning for. That structure is the backbone of any serious architecture website and it costs nothing extra to set up properly at the start.
What belongs on the page
The same short list works for a house extension and for a civic building:
- The brief in two sentences. Who the client was, in general terms, and what they asked for.
- The constraints. A tight site, a listed facade, a conservation area, a budget that had to stretch, a client who had to stay in the building throughout.
- What you proposed, and why. The one or two decisions the whole scheme turns on.
- Scope and services. Full services, planning only, concept design, contract administration. Clients genuinely do not know what they can hire you for.
- Facts worth stating. Location, project type, year of completion, floor area, consultants and the contractor, with credit for the photographer.
- Drawings as well as photographs. A plan and a section tell a client more about how you think than another hero shot.
- A line about the outcome. What the building does for the people in it now.
Only publish what the client is happy to have published, and keep anything sensitive about budgets or disputes off the page entirely.
Do architects need a portfolio, or a website?
It is one of the things people actually search for, and the honest answer is that a PDF portfolio and a website are two different tools. The portfolio is for a meeting you already have. The website is for the person who has not met you yet, is reading on a phone, and will decide in under a minute whether to keep scrolling. We go through what that person needs to see, and in what order, in our post on what an architect website should show.
That is why the images need handling with some care. Large photographs are the heaviest thing on an architecture site and the usual reason a page crawls on a phone. They should be sized and compressed for the web, loaded as the visitor scrolls, and given alt text that describes the building rather than reading "DSC_4471".
Want more inquiries from your website?
We'll look at your website and rankings and tell you plainly what we would fix first. No charge and no sales pitch.
How project pages help clients find you
Ask how architecture firms find work and most will say referrals, and they are right. But the referral is rarely the end of it. The name gets typed into Google that evening, and what comes back decides whether the call happens on Monday.
Project pages do the quiet work there. Each one gives your site another honest page about a type of building in a named place, which is exactly what search work for architects has to build on. Group them so a visitor can filter by residential, commercial, heritage or education, and link each project to the service it belonged to. Our own work page is laid out the same way, with a card per project leading to the detail.
Where the rest of the work fits
Taken in order, the website design and development comes first, because the project pages, the photography and the enquiry route all live on it. SEO then gets those pages found for the building types you want more of. Local SEO and local search for practices look after the map listing and the city you work in. Conversion rate optimization handles the last step, which is usually a contact form asking for far more than a first message needs.
Beyond that, AI search optimization matters more each year, because an assistant summarising "architects in my area" can only repeat what your pages say clearly. We design and build websites and do the search work around them. We are not an ads, social or email shop, and we do not promise rankings.
Make the next step obvious
A visitor who has just read about a project you finished last year is as warm as they are ever going to be. Do not send them back to the grid. End each page with a short line inviting an inquiry, a link to the service that project used, and two or three related projects underneath.
Keep the first contact light. A name, an email, the place and a sentence about the project is plenty. You can ask about budget and programme once a conversation has started.
Where to start
Take your three strongest completed projects and give each one a proper page this month, written in plain language with the brief, the constraints, the drawings and the credits. Leave the rest of the archive as a grid until those three are right.
If you want to know how your current site is doing first, run it through our free SEO audit tool, or message us on WhatsApp and we will tell you what we would change first.
Want more inquiries from your website?
We'll look at your website and rankings and tell you plainly what we would fix first. No charge and no sales pitch.
