According to the Atlanta SEO company called Cardinal Digital Marketing, “In a creative industry like interior design, it’s important for your website to convey that level of creativity and innovation. Interior designers need to show off their design skills online with a stellar first impression, and web design is the best way to translate talent from the workspace to the digital screen. A curated website creates the perfect opportunity to show off your work”. Here’s how you can create an amazing interior design portfolio website:
Choose An Interior Design Theme
Whether you choose Wordpress, Shopify, or Squarespace, choosing an interior design-inspired theme will eliminate much of the guesswork. Interior design themes offer useful features that are most relevant to your niche. Fortunately, there are plenty available online, like these interior design Wordpress themes. While the theme itself caters to your industry, you can easily adjust all elements to fit your needs, from menus to typography to images and more.
You’ll also want to make a list of interior design websites you like. In many cases, you can do a little digging to see what platform and theme they use, and make it your own; however, be careful not to infringe on copyrights by stealing design.
Utilize Typography
Bold typography allows your website to stand out, and can leave lasting impressions on the viewer. Typography is the technique and art behind type arrangement. Utilizing it in your design in much easier than you think.
Oliver Reichenstein, founder and director of design agency Information Architects, believes that web design is 95% typography. He wrote in an article, “Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability, overall graphic balance.”
Essentially, optimizing web design is also about optimizing often ignored elements like font. As you start your search online for the perfect font, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of choices, and you’ll most likely come across quite a few that grab your attention. To start, it’s best to limit your unique typography choices to headers and keep your content text simple and standard. If you have more than three different fonts, your pages will look unstructured and disorganized.
Show Off Your Portfolio
As an interior designer, your portfolio is your moneymaker. You’ll need a theme that not only accentuates the interior design aesthetic, but shows off your work in the best possible light.
Of course, the shining star of your portfolio are your images. This cannot be stated enough -- as an interior designer, your image quality speaks volumes for your work. It’s critical that you invest in good photography to effectively capture your talents. When it comes to web design, let your images take center stage. Large, high-resolution photos should be aplenty across your web pages.
Portfolio organization will also help your potential clients better understand why and how you’re a great match. They should be able to sort through examples of your work easily. One way to do this is to organize designs by style: traditional, modern, contemporary, or minimalist. You can also organize by residential and commercial, or room type.
Widgets like PhotoSnack can help in this area, and comes equipped with responsive sliders, photo templates, and much more. Portfolio Gallery is another solid options, and allows users to sort groups of photographs by category. Additionally, you can also create a lookbook or catalog of your design work using a digital publishing platform like Issu. Take a look at Laura Taylor’s interior design lookbook for inspiration.
Use Interior Design As Website Inspiration
As an interior design company, why not go back to the basics for inspiration? Use your products and physical store or office as a foundation for crafting your interior design website. Think of this as reverse-engineering a physical space.
Imagine how captivating it would be if your office space could accurately reflect your website, and vice versa. When it comes to web design, cohesiveness is a buzzword, but rarely do people talk about the fluidity of branding between a physical office and online presence.
One of the best ways to do this is to create an effective color palette. You’ll also want to hit the interior design section of the book store and look for other pages of inspirations. Create a mood board (take a look at some of the best mood boards here) to help build a cohesive look when it comes time to work on the website.
Sell Your Story
The best interior designers don’t just use their website real estate to sell their businesses, but to sell their stories. After all, interior design is a very client-facing field, and the people you work with need to be able to understand who you are and how you work. Your “About Me” page shouldn’t just ring off a list of previous clients and accomplishments. This is where you have the opportunity to have some fun, show off your personality, and be yourself.