We approached this interior design website redesign with the goal to build a new website that felt aligned to the values of the design firm, showcase their personality and expertise, as well as highlight their variety of work. Let’s dive into how we layered in strategy, user experience, search engine optimization and storytelling to bring this interior design website to life.
Table of Contents
Reviewing What’s No Longer Aligned
Before diving into any website design project, we always review what isn’t working for the client. For Nyla Free Designs, their business had shifted to a higher end client over the years–which became a big disconnect with their established site. Now in the luxury market space, their existing website felt flat, uninformative and didn’t showcase the scale of projects their team takes on. We wanted to find a way to showcase this, without feeling flashy.
Along with this, client education, process and sharing the personality behind NFD was an important consideration with the interior website redesign. From sharing BTS content on social media, to bringing readers along the journey with their Flodesk newsletter, to compelling case studies – we wanted this to be a welcoming place for potential clients to feel excited and part of the process–from initial interaction and beyond.
This Canada based interior design studio has been in business for over two decades, we wanted to make sure this was also a place to showcase their accolades, scope and ability to take on international projects.
Website Strategy and Considerations
With understanding what’s no longer serving this interior design studio from a website perspective, we now have clearer goals and strategy to implement with the website redesign overhaul.
During our website strategy phase, we spent a good portion of time on page structure and needs. With having an established website, misc. Pages can get added, details get diluted and soon enough it becomes daunting to try to navigate the website. By creating cohesion and cleaning up the page structure, this helps set a detailed and deliberate user journey experience.
Along with this, we spent time determining what pages should live in the top navigation vs. footer, and considerations on font hierarchy, button styling and mood board inspiration.
This was also the perfect time to upgrade the website from the existing 7.0 to 7.1 version for Squarespace. Extra care and detail was taken into consideration making this a smooth transition.
Building out the Interior Design Portfolio Website
With all the planning and website strategy in place, it was time to bring all the elements together. From carefully crafted website copy to culling through images and videography to layering in the different channels (shop, flodesk, intake forms, etc) to ensure the website feels thoughtful, innovative, personal and easy to navigate.
The design phase brought an important hurdle to light, with one of the client’s main colors yellow. It’s a color that the studio is known for, but we needed to approach this in a mindful way to ensure accessibility and legibility. Rather than having it be main background colors, we infused yellow into special moments such as line details, illustrations or high impact moments. This also allowed for the cream and navy to anchor the site–feeling more refined and luxury, but without the flash.
Since Nyla Free Designs is made up of a team of designers, led by Nyla Free, we wanted to make sure the about page felt unique. Beyond the traditional bio, we layered in a fun ‘Get to Know the Designer’ section, answering a set of questions to uncover the personality behind each designer.
Another important factor with the interior design website redesign was the portfolio. We wanted the interior design case studies to feel editorial, insightful, and highlight the benefits (and challenges) that come with each large scale process. From stunning professional images, to sketches to in progress photos, the case studies are both visually appealing, but also help tell the story of each project. This not only helps showcase the expertise and experience behind the studio, but also allows for search engine optimized case studies to potentially bring in new clients.
Launch and Beyond
As with any website, the launch is not the end goal or result–rather a jumping off point to continue with the momentum behind the website redesign. This new look allows for an easier user journey, thoughtfully designed sections and layouts, as well as compelling case studies. From here, the interior design studio can continue to layer in new portfolio projects, add to the blog for continued SEO strategy and gather new leads via their online intake form or Flodesk newsletter. I know I’m excited to see this Squarespace website for interior designers flourish and evolve season over season.
Frequently Asked Questions
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The most popular website platforms for interior designers are Squarespace, Showit and Wordpress. Each has their benefits, but I’ve found that Squarespace offers a nice sweet spot with the ability to have standard pages like Home, About, Process, as well as more robust pages such as Portfolio/Case Studies and Blog all built in.
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For a website redesign we recommend having final branding assets, updated brand imagery of headshots and projects, refined website copy with SEO in mind. There’s many other elements and details needed, but these are some key items necessary for a worthwhile interior design website overhaul.
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This truly depends on your interior design business. Industry standard is an overhaul typically happens every 4-8 years, but really depends on your brand’s growth, evolution and established website.
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