Architect Website Design for Residential and Small Commercial Practices

Good architect website design answers three things for a stranger in under a minute: what kind of buildings you design, where you work, and what hiring you actually involves. For a residential or small commercial practice, that means real project pages, services explained phase by phase, licensure shown correctly, and an inquiry form that asks the right questions. We design and write sites like this from $1,000.

What architect website design has to accomplish

A small practice's site has to turn a curious homeowner into a qualified inquiry. Most people who land on it have never hired an architect before, and they don't know what you charge for, how long design takes, or whether their project is too small for you.

That's the gap to close. A house in a magazine tells them you have taste. It doesn't tell them whether you'd take on a $400,000 addition in their town, or whether you also handle the permit set.

Your audience usually splits three ways:

• Homeowners planning a new house, an addition, a renovation, or an ADU
• Builders and developers looking for an architect they can work alongside
• Owners of small commercial spaces: a dental office, a restaurant fit-out, a mixed-use building on Main Street

This page is about firms that design buildings. If you design parks, campuses, and public open space, our page on websites for landscape architecture firms is the better fit.

A page plan for a small architecture firm website

Here's the structure we'd start from for a practice of one to fifteen people. Trim it if you're smaller; don't pad it.

1. Home. One plain sentence on the work you do and where, then three or four recent projects.
2. Projects. Filterable by type: new homes, additions and renovations, ADUs, commercial interiors, small commercial buildings.
3. One page per service type. Residential new construction, renovations and additions, ADUs, commercial. Each says who it's for and what the process looks like.
4. Process. Your phases, what the client receives at the end of each, and where approvals and permits fit.
5. Studio. Principals and staff, with licensure stated accurately, plus the builders and consultants you work with.
6. Inquiry. A form that asks for project type, location, rough budget, and timing.

Project pages that do more than show photos

A project page should explain the problem before it shows the answer. Start with a short brief, then let the images carry the rest.

What to include on each one:

• Location (town is enough for private homes), building type, and square footage
• The brief in two or three sentences: what the owners needed and what stood in the way
• Your scope, such as full services or design through permit only
• The builder and photographer, credited by name
• At least one drawing: a floor plan, a section, or a site plan

That last point is where architects can stand apart from home builders and interior designers. A plan next to the photos shows prospective clients how you think, and builders reading the page see the kind of documents they'd be working from.

Explain your services as phases

Homeowners don't know what "full architectural services" means, so break it into steps they can follow. The AIA's standard owner-architect agreement describes basic services in five phases: schematic design, design development, construction documents, procurement, and construction. That sequence works well as the backbone of a process page.

For each phase, write what the client does, what they get, and what decision closes it out. Say schematic design ends with floor plans and massing the owners approve. Construction documents end with a permit set. Put the permit submission and any design review board on the timeline, because that's where many homeowners expect delays.

If you work hourly, as a percentage of construction cost, or with a fixed fee, say which. You don't have to publish numbers. People mostly want to know how fees are calculated before they reach out.

Licensure and the word "architect" on your site

Use the title "architect" only for people who hold a license. That's the rule across the country: NCARB notes the title is protected by law in all 55 U.S. jurisdictions.

Details still vary, since each jurisdiction sets its own licensure requirements. Some boards are stricter than people expect. California's board warns that candidates who aren't yet licensed there risk enforcement for using any form of "architect," including "architectural" and "architecture," in a title or service description, and it bars employers from putting that word in an unlicensed employee's job title.

On the website, that translates to a few habits:

• List each licensed architect with the states where they're licensed.
• Give unlicensed staff accurate titles like designer or project manager.
• If you take projects in other states, say where you're licensed instead of implying national reach.
• Check your own state board's rules on firm names and advertising before launch.

We'll flag wording issues while writing, but your board's rules are the final word, and you should confirm them.

Common mistakes on architecture firm websites

The most frequent problem is a site that looks like a gallery and reads like nothing. Here are the patterns we'd fix first:

• Project titles with no location or building type ("House 07")
• Light gray text over photos, which is hard to read on a phone in daylight
• No mention of the towns or counties you work in
• A contact page with only an email address and no prompts about the project
• Huge uncompressed images that make each page slow to open

How we build websites for architects

We build websites for design and landscape businesses, including architecture firms. The work runs mostly in writing. You get a questionnaire about your projects, clients, phases, and licensure, and we write the copy from your answers. You review it, correct anything technical, and approve. Calls are optional, which suits principals who are on site half the week.

From there we do the structure, custom design, development, mobile version, basic SEO, and launch. Prices start at $1,000. The final figure depends on page count and features like project filters, and the scope, schedule, payment plan, and revision rounds are written into the proposal before anything starts. If you're comparing budgets, here's a breakdown of what websites cost. Once the site is live, our notes on SEO for architecture practices cover how to get it found.