An interior design website that wins the right clients
Interior design clients buy taste and judgement, so they look at finished rooms first. Then they want to know whether you'd take on their project and how you charge. An interior design website should show the work beautifully, explain the service tiers, and lead to a consultation with a brief already in hand.
The portfolio is the pitch
A visitor decides within a few images whether your style is theirs. Show finished, professionally photographed rooms where you can, and organise them two ways: by project, so people see a whole home hang together, and by room, so someone planning a kitchen can see every kitchen you've done. A short caption per project helps: the brief, the main change, and one or two details such as reused furniture or a bespoke joinery piece.
Keep projects in an Anticode CMS collection with fields for title, location, rooms, style, the brief and the images, so each project has its own page and new work goes in from the dashboard. Upload your own photographs. Mood boards and 3D visuals can be shown too, as long as they're labelled as proposals.
Service tiers people can tell apart
"Full interior design service" means different things to different designers. Spell out what each level includes:
| Tier | What the client gets | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Consultation | A visit or call, advice on layout, colour and next steps, sometimes a short written summary | People doing it themselves who want a second eye |
| Design only | Concept, mood boards, layout plans and a specified product list the client buys and installs | Confident clients with their own trades |
| Full design | Design plus procurement, trade coordination, site visits and installation styling | Busy clients and larger projects |
| Remote design | Boards, plans and a shopping list delivered online | Clients outside your area or on a tighter budget |
Being honest about fees
Clients ask about money early, and silence makes many assume they can't afford you. You don't need a price list, but explain your approach: a fixed design fee per room or project, an hourly rate for consultations, a percentage of the project budget, or a trade-discount arrangement on furniture. Say whether you mark up products, and give a minimum project size if you have one. A fixed-price consultation or a remote design package can carry a buy button pointing at a payment link from your own Stripe, PayPal or Gumroad account. There's one payment link per account, so every buy button opens the same checkout; if you sell both, link to a product list at your provider.
The brief questionnaire
A good questionnaire saves the first meeting from being a list of basic questions. Ask for the property type and location, which rooms, whether it's a refresh or structural work, the budget range and timescale, who lives there (children, pets, working from home), styles they like and dislike, and what they want to keep. A free-text field for "what's not working now" often tells you more than any other answer. Clients can describe inspiration images and send them when you reply by email.
A questionnaire this long works better as separate fields than as one message box. A custom form tied to a site function takes up to 30 plain-text fields; for anything longer or more interactive, ask for it as an app build, where the model writes the form with the questions you list. Either way the answers arrive through Anticode's form pipeline like any other enquiry.
Submissions are saved sealed at rest and can be emailed to you, or sent to Notion or Airtable through a connector to start a project record. A consultation slot can then be booked from the calendar, which offers six fixed times over the coming days (Mondays skipped) and takes one booking per slot; you confirm each booking yourself.
Where generated design sites fall down
- Stock photos of rooms you didn't design. Clients and other designers recognise them, and it undermines everything else.
- Vague tier names ("Silver", "Gold") with no description of what's delivered.
- Body text in light grey on beige, which looks refined and is hard to read.
- Five different typefaces trying to signal good taste. One family, used well, signals it better.
Building it with Anticode
Start with a sentence such as "an interior designer in Edinburgh doing full design and remote design for period homes, with a portfolio by room and a brief questionnaire". The Architect asks the questions that change the build and shows the plan. The portfolio kind with Work, Services, About and Contact pages fits most practices. Luxury (Jost) suits high-end residential work, Editorial (Geist) a practice that writes about its projects, Organic (Figtree) a warm, natural style. One font family and one action colour keep the site from competing with the rooms.
What Anticode doesn't cover
- No shoppable products or cart. If you sell furniture or accessories, link to a shop on a commerce platform.
- No client portal for sharing boards, approvals or invoices on the published site.
- No uploads in forms; inspiration images come by email.
- No deposits taken by the booking calendar; use a payment link for paid consultations.
Questions people ask
Should an interior designer show prices on their website?
Explain how you charge and give a starting point or minimum project size. Fixed-price consultations and remote packages can show a price and a buy button, which opens your account's one payment link.
How many projects should be in the portfolio?
Enough to show your range, usually a handful of well-photographed projects with captions, rather than every job you've done.
Can clients book a consultation on the site?
Yes, from the booking calendar. If the consultation is paid, send a payment link or add a buy button, because the calendar doesn't take payment.