Milad Mohammadi
An architecture studio website has one job: help a client who found you through a friend decide you are worth a call. For Haldane Rook, a London and Manchester studio of 34 people, we built a site around large project imagery and one clear way to start a conversation. In six months, qualified enquiries rose 3.6 times.
The client and the problem
Haldane Rook designs housing, schools and civic buildings. Most of their work came from referrals, so the old site was a thin portfolio that nobody had touched in four years. Prospective clients landed on it, saw small photographs and a contact address, and left.
The partners wanted fewer, better enquiries. Councils and housing associations needed to see built work at scale, and private clients needed to know whether the studio would take a small commission.
What we built and why
We kept the design deliberately quiet so the buildings do the talking. The site has four parts:
Selected work: an index of 112 completed projects, each with a large photograph, location, size and year
Services: four plain-language descriptions, from feasibility studies to retrofit
Studio: who leads each project, how many commissions the team takes a year (about eight), and the awards
Start a project: a short brief form that asks for the site, the budget range and the timeline
The partners add new projects, journal articles and images themselves from the dashboard. Each enquiry arrives as a message with the brief attached, so nothing is lost in an inbox.
What was the result?
Six months after launch, the studio compared the site against the previous year:
Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Qualified enquiries per month | 5 | 18 |
Share of enquiries with a stated budget | 22% | 71% |
Homepage load time on mobile | 4.1 s | 1.3 s |
The enquiries are also better. The studio now turns down fewer briefs for being too small and spends the first call on the project, not on explaining who they are.
Show your largest and your smallest finished projects side by side. It tells a prospective client exactly what range you take on.
How long does an architecture studio website take?
A studio site with a project index, service pages and a brief form usually takes four to six weeks, most of it spent on photography and project write-ups. The Haldane Rook site launched 37 days after the first photographs arrived.
Can the studio add projects without calling us?
Yes. Projects, articles, images and enquiries are managed from the dashboard. The page layouts and design stay with the Dasht team, so the site stays consistent and fast.
Do you handle the project photography?
We work with the photographs you have and advise on what is missing. Large, well-cropped images matter more than anything else on an architecture site.
See what a studio site costs on the pricing page. For background on how clients judge professional firms online, the Nielsen Norman Group’s research on credibility is a useful read.
To receive a free consultation or start a project, click the "Start a Project" button (at the bottom of this page).
