Website Design for Architects in Kenya: Showing Work That Wins Commissions

Architecture is a portfolio business

Clients cannot judge drawings they have not seen, so they judge the practice by what it shows. A studio that presents three projects well beats one that lists twenty with no detail. The website is the portfolio, and it has to load quickly and look right on the phone a client is holding in a meeting.

The pages a studio needs

• ✓A home page that leads with your best built work.
• ✓A projects index that is easy to scan by type or location.
• ✓Individual project pages with real information on each.
• ✓A studio page: the people, their registration and their roles.
• ✓Services: design, visualisation, approvals and site supervision.
• ✓Contact details with the physical studio location.

Project pages carry the weight

Each project should have its own page: client type, location, brief and constraints, your exact role, size in square metres, year, status, and the consultants or contractors who agree to be named. A paragraph on what the design had to solve is what separates your page from a photo gallery.

• ✓Type, location and the brief the client brought you.
• ✓Your role: design architect, executive architect, supervision or visualisation.
• ✓Size, years and current status of the project.
• ✓Approvals and consultants you coordinated.
• ✓A label on every image: render or photograph.

Built, unbuilt and competition work: label them

Renders shown as though they were photographs are the fastest way to lose a client’s trust, and Kenyan clients increasingly check. Label visualisations, mark unbuilt schemes and competition entries as such, and note where a project changed between design and completion. Honesty here reads as experience, not weakness.

Registrations and the approvals clients want handled

Put BORAQS registration on the page for every architect named, and be clear about the difference between an architect, a graduate architect and an architectural technologist — clients and tender committees look for it. List the approvals you routinely handle: county planning approvals, change of use, subdivision, and the NCA and NEMA processes around them.

Images, search and the visual web

Architecture is searched visually. File names and alt text should describe the project and its location, images should be served at sensible sizes in modern formats, and a gallery should never force a visitor on mobile data to download eight-megabyte photographs. Google Images and local map results bring real enquiries to practices that get this right.

Qualifying the enquiry without losing it

A short form that asks what the client is building, where, the plot status, the service needed and the timeline produces a useful first call. Offer the budget as ranges rather than a blank box, and say what happens next so the enquiry does not stall.

What to avoid

• ✓A slideshow with no project names, locations or years.
• ✓Instagram as the only portfolio, with no website to search.
• ✓Uncompressed render galleries that stall on mobile.
• ✓Stock architecture imagery standing in for your work.

Next steps

Microstation designs and builds websites for architects and design studios in Kenya — portfolio-led, fast on mobile data, structured so each project is a page Google can index, and simple for your team to update as work completes. Show us your studio’s best work and we will quote the site that presents it properly.