Web Hosting for Interior Designers

The portfolio is the product, and the file sizes are the problem

A design website sells one thing, which is the evidence that you can do this. Nobody hires you off a services list. They scroll a room, then another room, and somewhere in there they decide. So the photography has to be good, and it has to actually arrive.

Here is where it goes wrong. Your photographer sends you the finished set, and those files are enormous by design, because they were made for print and for you to crop from. They get uploaded exactly as delivered. Now a single project page is carrying more data than a feature film trailer, and the visitor on a phone in a parking lot sees a white screen for eight seconds and leaves.

The cruel part is that nothing looks broken. On your office machine, on the fast connection, the site is fine. You never see the version your prospective client sees.

Quality and weight are not the same thing

You do not have to trade one for the other, and this is the single most useful thing to understand about running a portfolio. An image that fills a laptop screen beautifully does not need to be six thousand pixels wide. Saved at a sensible width and a sensible compression level, the same photograph looks identical to a human eye and weighs a small fraction of what it did.

• Export at roughly the largest size it will ever be displayed, not the largest size you own.
• Use modern image formats where you can. They cut the weight again with no visible difference.
• Let the browser load images below the fold only when the visitor scrolls to them.
• Keep the untouched originals somewhere safe. They are your archive, not your website.

If you take nothing else from this page: the fix for a slow portfolio is almost never a bigger hosting plan. It is resizing the photographs. A larger plan makes a heavy page arrive heavy, slightly faster.

Project pages beat one big gallery

The default design portfolio is a single page called Portfolio with every good photograph you own on it. It is the wrong shape for two separate reasons, and fixing it fixes the speed problem at the same time.

First, it is a wall. A prospective client cannot tell whether the modern lake house and the traditional dining room came from the same job, the same year, or the same taste. Mixed together, forty rooms read as forty unrelated pictures. Broken into projects, twelve rooms read as one coherent house you designed, which is what they are trying to evaluate.

Second, one page carrying every image is one page carrying every image. Split into projects, each page loads a dozen photographs instead of a hundred, and the visitor only pays for the one they asked for.

1. Give each project its own page

   One residence, one commercial fit-out, one renovation. A short title, the location in general terms, and a sentence about what the client wanted.

2. Write two or three paragraphs of real text

   What the brief was, what you changed, what the constraint was. This is the part search engines can read, and the part that separates you from a photo account.

3. Order the photographs like a walkthrough

   Arrive, move through, end on the detail you are proudest of. A gallery in upload order is a gallery in no order.

4. Use the index page as a contact sheet

   One well-sized lead image per project linking through. The index stays light and gives the visitor a decision to make instead of a wall to scroll.

5. Name the files like a person would

   A file called kitchen-renovation-elmwood.jpg is worth more than IMG_4471.jpg, and it takes no extra work if you do it at export.

This structure also makes the site easier to keep current. Finishing a job means adding one page, not restructuring a gallery.

Trade and retail are two different audiences

Plenty of designers serve both a retail client, meaning the homeowner writing the cheque, and a trade audience, meaning builders, architects, showrooms and other designers who send work your way. They want completely different things from your website and they do not mix well on one page.

The homeowner wants to know what it will feel like and roughly what it costs to work with you. The trade contact wants to know what you handle, how you invoice, what your lead time is, and whether you are easy to coordinate with on site. Written to the homeowner, a trade page sounds vague. Written to the trade, a homeowner page sounds cold.

The simplest fix is a separate page for the trade audience, linked from the footer rather than shouted about in the main navigation, saying plainly how you work with them. It also gives you something to send when a contractor asks what you do, which is the most common way that relationship starts.

If you send project details, price lists or specifications to trade contacts by email, that email should be at your own domain rather than a free account. It reads as a business, and it is the address people search their inbox for later. There is more on that on the business email page.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has been building and looking after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and portfolio sites sunk by their own photographs are familiar work. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, which means we have no reason to sell you a tier you do not need, and we will say so when the plan you are already on is the right one.

If your site runs on WordPress, which many design portfolios do, the division of responsibility for updates and plugins is set out on the WordPress hosting page. If you are moving an existing portfolio to a new host, the order of operations that keeps your email working through the change is on the website migration page. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your site runs on and we will look at it.