The website of an architecture practice
An architecture practice is judged on its projects, not on its arguments. Almost every site in the trade does the opposite.
· 9 min read · Noor Studio Agency
The visitor has decided before reading a line
Someone looking for an architect or an interior designer opens three or four sites in the same hour. They do not read them: they scroll. What is being decided at that moment is not an understanding of your method, but a much blunter question — does this practice do the kind of work I want in my home, or for my project?
The answer forms on the images, and on how they are presented. An architect’s site whose first visible element is a paragraph about "a human-centred approach" is asking its visitor to read in order to decide whether to look. That is the reverse of the order that works.
That does not mean there should be no text. It means the text comes afterwards, to explain what the visitor has already seen — not before, to persuade them to look.
Why a portfolio template underserves visual work
Portfolio templates are sold on a screenshot, and that screenshot is made with photographs chosen to suit the template. Your projects were not photographed to suit a template. The mismatch shows from the first upload, and it shows on the following specific points.
- Automatic cropping. A template imposes a grid — squares, 4:3, 16:9 — and centre-crops whatever does not fit. A vertical enfilade, a joinery detail, a low-angle perspective: those are precisely the images that lose their subject to a centred crop.
- Density. A grid of nine equal thumbnails treats a delivered project and an unbuilt study as two objects of equal weight. Your hierarchy disappears in favour of the template’s.
- Effects. Coloured hover filters, zooms, staggered reveals: these are additions that draw attention, and anything that draws attention on an architectural photograph draws it away from the photograph.
- Weight. A generic template loads animation libraries and typefaces you use none of. On a site where every page is a sequence of high-resolution images, that budget is already spent.
The structure that works: the gallery as the backbone
Invert the usual hierarchy of a showcase site. Instead of a home page that introduces the practice and links to a "Projects" tab, make the gallery the home page itself, and reduce the copy to whatever helps make sense of each project.
The test is simple: a visitor should be able to judge the quality of the practice in three scrolls, without reading a line. If your home page fails that test, no amount of copy will rescue it.
In practice that gives a three-level hierarchy.
- The gallery. Your best projects, in a format that lets the images breathe. Not all your projects: the ones you want to do again.
- The project page. One per project, with its own address. It is the page people send in a message, the one a magazine cites, and the only one that can appear in a search for a specific kind of project.
- The practice. Who you are, how you work, how to reach you. One page, not a section on every page.
What a project page contains
A project page that works answers what a prospective client wonders while looking at it, in the order they wonder it. It is neither a technical sheet nor a competition text.
- Where, what, when. City, type of programme, year, floor area where it means something. Three lines at the top of the page are enough, and they place everything that follows.
- The problem set. A real constraint: an awkward plot, an existing structure, a budget, an orientation. It is what turns handsome images into a demonstration of competence.
- The answer, shown. The images in the order of a walk through — approach, entrance, spaces, one or two details. Not in the order the photographer shot them.
- The drawings, if you show any. A legible plan or section beats a full board that is unreadable on a phone. If a drawing is not legible small, it does not serve on a website.
- Credits. Photographer, team, contractors. It is a matter of professional courtesy, and it earns you links from the sites of the people you credit.
The copy that stays
An architecture practice does not need much copy, but it needs three things written plainly, because no image says them.
What you do and do not do. Private houses, renovation, commercial, hospitality, interiors alone: a client who has to guess leaves. A clear boundary loses you off-target enquiries, which is the point.
How a project runs. The stages, what you supply, what the client supplies, at which points they decide. It is the information sought by someone hesitating between two practices who has never built before.
How you are paid. Not a price: the principle. Percentage, fixed fee per phase, full or partial commission. Saying it removes an awkwardness, and awkwardness costs first meetings.
Being found without becoming a blog
A practice does not have to publish an article a week to exist in search. Its project pages are its content, and they have an advantage nobody can copy: they are unique.
Three moves are worth most editorial strategies in this trade. Name project pages for what they are — the city and the programme rather than "Project 07". Write a title and description specific to each page. And add the structured data describing the practice as a local organisation, with its address, which makes it eligible for mapped results.
The rest comes from publications that cover your projects and from the sites of the people you credit. It is slower than a campaign, and it lasts longer.
What to gather before starting
The duration of a website project for a practice almost never depends on the development. It depends on the availability of images. Gathering the following before the first meeting saves weeks.
- The original photography files, at full resolution, rather than versions already compressed for social media.
- Written web usage rights from each photographer. A commission for a shoot does not always cover online publication, and it is the kind of point discovered at the wrong moment.
- Client consent for the private projects you want to show, particularly inhabited interiors.
- Drawings exported cleanly, black on white, without title blocks or setting-out layers.
- The list of projects to show, in order. It is the hardest decision and it is yours: it defines the work you will be asked for next.
Frequently asked
How many projects should be shown?
Enough to establish a way of working, not so many that it dilutes. Six solid projects, all of the kind of work you want more of, beat twenty that show you take anything. A project you are not proud of attracts clients who want that project.
Should unbuilt projects be shown?
Yes, as long as it is stated. A study, a competition entry or a render presented without a label suggests the practice built something it did not, and that comes out. Labelled as such, they show intent and drawing ability, which is useful for a young practice.
Does a Moroccan practice need an English site?
It depends who you want to hear from. For local clients, French is often enough. As soon as you are aiming at foreign owners, hospitality projects or international editorial coverage, an English version with its own address per page becomes useful — not an on-load machine translation, which no search engine indexes.
And at Noor Studio Agency?
We built the Noor Architect site on exactly this logic: the gallery carries the site, the existing monogram identity was taken as-is, and the layout steps back behind the photography. The case study sets out the decisions taken and the ones we rejected.
See what that looks like
The simplest thing is to look at a site we have delivered in a trade close to yours, and judge it on the work.