The Architect’s Guide to An Effective Website

by Digital Harness,
(a division of the White Fern design agency focused
on website support and maintenance)

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Why focus on your website?

Architects that prioritize updating their website and speaking to the right audience get more clients, get better clients, and improve the trajectory of their project load.

What web centric businesses know is that once a visitor lands on a website,  they will self select based on what is presented to them. Your website has the potential to attract and excite the right kind of client that you want,  and turn away the kind you don’t.

Acting as your first filter, your website can then funnel the right clients smoothly to your contact info and send them to call you.

Note: While your website can be one of your most important marketing and client qualifying tools, it can also be a big liability if not taken care of.. Updating your website is a necessary (but often overlooked) element in keeping your business and reputation secure from harm and costly hacks.

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Your website is your defining impression on potential new clients

Most people when considering a big choice like which architect to go with, will hop online and visit your website before calling or setting up a meeting.

Even if they’ve been recommended by someone they trust or have read about you before, the website is still the first place people go to get a sense of your work and your work’s quality.

We call this the defining impression because when they land on your website, the first judgement they make about your work and the first feeling they get from your website’s appearance sets the tone for how they think about you as a professional.

We think about the defining impression like making a first impression when meeting someone new in real life.

There are a few ways to measure how successful your defining impression is.

Research indicates that a visitor first makes a judgement about your website in about  50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) once landing on your site. This visceral first judgement is a feeling they get based only on your website’s design and how it looks.

Your goal within this first split moment is to convince them with your design, images, and layout to stick around and investigate further.

For the visitors that stick around, the biggest measure of success for an architect’s website is likely to then convince your potential clients to take the next step in their ‘architect hiring journey’ and contact you via an initial phone call or to set up an initial meeting.. 

The following points are designed to help you reflect on your website. To think about the things it’s currently doing well, and identify the areas where it could be improved.

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01

Realize not all visitors are the same

The first thing to realize is that not all website visitors are coming to your site with the same intention, seriousness, or knowledge level about what it is you have to offer.

Thinking about a visitor’s intent is key to offering them the right information. 

Some people are coming to your website just to check our your work without having an immediate need or desire to hire an architect. Others are coming to you website who are just beginning their architect search. Still others may be coming to you because they’re already into their project and are unhappy with their current design team, or need a specific recommendation about a builder to work with..

Let it be the job of your website to funnel these people to the right resources they need, and to educate them along the way about your services… 

If you do a good job at educating those with lower intent, they become your clients down the line. If you do a good job at convincing those with a higher intent, you’ve just paved the way to an initial phone call or meeting.

02

Think about your real value offering

The most central thing in offering the right information to visitors is defining very clearly what it is you offer and the real value you’re providing.

Oftentimes this takes a deeper level of thinking than just thinking about your final deliverables. In the case of architects, the successful ones know that what they offer is much deeper than just the plans for a building…

The reason people choose architects is often connected to risk mitigation, the ease of having a professional guide through the permitting, design, and building process, and at its root the feeling of trust that the building they end up with will function beautifully and look great!

Your real value proposition is all of these things (process, feelings, and all) while your portfolio is your proof of past success.

Tying this back to your business and website now.. is your website currently doing a great job at communicating your real value proposition to potential clients?

03

Prove you’re an expert at what you do

Once you’ve done a good job at laying out your value proposition and visitors feel good about your full offering, your next logical task is to prove you can deliver on what you’re promising.

This is where laying out your portfolio is proof of your past success and quality. Producing content like articles and books is another great way to demonstrate expertise. Finally, client testimonials are a great way to share what it’s like to work with you.

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04

Improve your call to action & contact page

One big mistake a lot of business websites make is to not prompt their visitors to take an action.

People often need a trigger or suggestion to move from thinking about reaching out, to actually committing and doing it. By periodically providing a button, a call-out, or listing contact details you will likely convert some passive visitors to active visitors seeking an intro call or meeting.

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05

Is your website easily scannable?

This gets down to the design of your website. 

When people visit a website, most people will not read all the text. In fact a lot of people won’t read any of the text… The first thing most visitors do is scan your website. 

They look at the pictures and take in the headlines. If there is just too much text they will leave.

One of the biggest things you can do to improve your website and convert the clients you want is to take a step back and make sure your website is easily scannable.

06

Take your website updates very seriously

Website updates are core to getting more traffic and to protecting your business from potentially serious harm.

Updates when done correctly and often work by patching old vulnerabilities in your website’s underlying code and plug-ins. They also have potential to bring new speed, SEO, and functionality features and best practices to your website.

This keeps your website ranking well in Google, future-proof to withstand new changes and tech updates to the overall internet, and secure from hacks and malicious attacks.

Small businesses get hacked more often than people realize, and the reason is that they tend to be less sophisticated at keeping their website tech updated…

The core of what we do is website support. Packages like ours are designed to keep on top of website security, updates, and SEO.

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07

Find relevant partners and cross-promote

One of the best ways for professional services like architects to get better, more qualified traffic to their website is by cross promoting with relevant, tangential partners.

You probably already are cross promoting your business with tangential partners like trusted builders and construction professionals, referring work to each other..

You can take this one step further by bringing this relationship online. You can send them website traffic looking for builders and they can send design clients your way. That way, web visitors end up where they need to be, and you and your partners will both will get more web traffic.

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08

Think again about your images

This goes back to the scanability of your website. Your images are the first thing people look at, and as an architect one of your biggest tools for selling your services.

People will judge your architecture services on how your work looks.

It sounds basic, but putting more focus into improving your images and image quality will get you better clients.

The other thing to mention about images is that with image heavy websites (like portfolios), it becomes very important to think about image sizing and website load speeds. Images are naturally heavy files and can slow down your website a lot if not properly sized and compressed.

Take extra care and your website will look great, load quickly, and attract the clients you want.

09

Look into your website accessibility

An often overlooked element of web design, but an increasingly important one (crucial for some visitors) is to make sure your website is fully accessible to visually impaired users.

Things like making text sizes and colors easy to read, making enough color contrast between elements and backgrounds, and making sure you have the right cues for screen readers..

Accessibility is important not only for some users, but increasingly is used by Google to help determine rankings.

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10

Always be measuring, testing, and analyzing!

Finally, make sure you have some analytics tracking on your website (we use Google Analytics). This will let you see how many visitors you get, which pages or sections of your website are most interesting to them, and which portfolio pieces people are attracted to the most.

Always be measuring, testing new things, and analyzing what’s working for your visitors!