5 Best Tips to Build an Impressive Interior Design Website
For interior designers, having an awesome website helps to show off your talent in curating a space. This is highlighted in the images you use on it. Your interior design website is your online home and it should be exciting and electrifying. Not only should it reflect your style but it should resonate with potential clients that visit it. What are the secrets to creating an amazing interior design website? So glad you asked because we are dying to tell you!
When it comes to building an interior design website that will impress visitors, there are a few things to consider. The first impression clients have of you is what they see when visiting your website for the first time. We’ve come up with five ways to build an impressive interior design website that you must check out!
1. Custom vs. Template Website
How much money do you plan on spending to build your interior design website? How much time will it take to get it fully designed and launched? These are the first questions you should ask yourself when figuring out your budget. Then you can visualize how big of a project it could be.
There are a lot of website building programs that offer templates you can easily plug photos and text into. These options can be convenient and perfect if you are looking to get your website up yourself. However, there is a drawback on these. They all tend to look the same, lack personality and often aren’t optimized for high Google rankings. Understandably, having to learn how to build a website and design it can be overwhelming and daunting. Going this route could cost you less than $300 but you’ll end up devoting lots of time on the learning curve.
Although a custom built website can be expensive, it can also be rewarding. The man-hours alone to build a custom website can run into the thousands. However, if you invest the time and money, your website would be unique and will stand out amongst your competitors.
2. Brand Your Website
We believe that branding for interior designers is important, so your brand identity needs to be seen on your website as well. To have customers immediately recognize your brand, you need to be consistent. If your specialty is rocking the mid-century modern style, make it obvious. Or, if you focus on coastal chic, try having a warm and relaxed welcome on your website. If you master the art of Farmhouse, it’s best that they can tell that right away. To properly brand your website you must first develop strategies that will help you meet your goals. The strategies must be customized to portray both your voice and the culture and history of your business. Once you have good strategies in place, then a plan can easily be formed and executed.
Part of the plan should include smartphones and mobile browsing. Today’s customer is on the go and websites aren’t only viewed on a home computer. Your brand needs to not only be obvious from the second a customer clicks on your website from their house, but from their phones as well.
3. Professional Photos
Having an amazing photo as the main page of your website is going to be the first impression prospective clients have from you, so it is important to blow them out of the water. We suggest choosing one great, full-width photo, that will accurately tell your customers who you are, and what your brand is.
Take photos a step further and make them interactive. Give clients an option to change not just furniture items in your designs, but the color of furniture and the artwork on the walls as well. If you let the customer feel like they are in control on your website, they will be more comfortable knowing that you will incorporate their ideas into their final design.
Videos are also important so that you can literally give a tour to your website visitors of a space, or collection of spaces, that you designed. You want them to be able to feel like they are a part of the space, not just looking at the space. With a custom site you would even take it one step further and not only give them a video but a video they can control by moving their mouse so that they can look at a particular area.
Ultimately, with the use of photos and videos, you want your website to be fresh and fun. You want visitors to be drawn into your designs and feel comfortable among your world.
4. Include Call-To-Actions In Your Design
The last thing you want to do is have a potential client visit your website and then leave. This could happen not because the website doesn’t catch their attention, but also because they aren’t sure what to do next. Call-to-actions (CTA’s) are important because they help lead the customers to perform the next steps you are wanting them to perform.
Common CTA’s can include phrases like, “Click Here For…”, “Sign Up For a Free Trial”, “Buy Now”, “Learn More” and “Schedule a Demo or Consultation”. Phrases like these encourage your visitor to keep digging deeper into your website which allows them to get more of an idea of what you can offer them. Without a CTA, a client can get easily overwhelmed or lost.
Instead of a drop-down list of rooms, they can view, you can encourage them with the CTA of “Check out these gorgeous living rooms”. The use of descriptive words in these phrases, like gorgeous, beautiful, amazing and spectacular, will further help draw in your client. The further into your website your client explores, the more likely they are to see great ideas that inspire them. Once inspired by you, the client will probably call you to help them design rooms in their homes.
Check This Out > Stun your clients with these five ideas to impress with your interior design website that will have them picking up the phone to call you. Click To Tweet5. Keep An Eye On Your Mobile Website
Your mobile website is a huge deal when it comes to your business as a whole. Not just for branding purposes, but because in many cases a client will visit your website first on their phones, not on a computer. You want your mobile website to be easy to use, easy to read, have a fast display, and stand out with photos, images, and colors that will catch someone’s eye.
A potential customer doesn’t want to scroll too long to get the information they are looking for. They want it readily available. Since the mobile screen size is so much smaller than a computer, you have to give the same immediate impression in tinier space. Focus on rich media that is compelling and will pull the consumer in. Make your website interactive by letting users move furniture or change colors just by touching the screen.
Many customers will use their mobile device more than their computer so you want to make them just as comfortable on your website from their phones as they are when sitting at their desk. Some customer will first check you out from their phones, and others may never look at your website from a computer. If you don’t have a mobile website that wows your customer with exquisite design and readability, then you may lose that client immediately.
Next Steps…
How do you feel? Are you ready to start building your own fancy interior design website now? If you still have questions or are not sure yet, reach out and let us know! We would be glad to help you answer your question, or even sign on to assist you in designing your website.
