Don’t Rebuild Your Interior Design Site for the Phone

You don’t need a new website for phones.

I say that to interior designers on nearly every sales call I take, usually inside the first two minutes, and then I spend the rest of the call quietly walking bits of it back.

So let me answer it properly for once, with more than the thirty seconds I normally get.

The question, more or less word for word

It turns up in one of three costumes.

My site looks squished when I pull it up on my own phone. My niece says it isn’t mobile friendly. A company I’ve never heard of emailed to say I’m failing Google on mobile and they’ll fix it for a monthly fee.

Underneath all three sits the same worry. The work is beautiful, the phone is where strangers meet it, and you’d like to know whether the phone is letting you down.

Fair worry. Your thumb finds the portfolio without looking, so your own phone can’t answer it. Whose phone has?

What the check is actually asking

A page fails that check at the moment a woman has to zoom in to read your studio’s name, then drag the page back to the left to find where the sentence carried on.

She won’t do that twice for a stranger. She’s back in the results, tapping the studio underneath you, and you never knew she was there.

Google is looking for those two faults and nothing else. Type she can’t read at arm’s length, and a layout wider than the screen it landed on.

It has no opinion at all about whether the room in the photograph is any good, which is worth saying out loud to people who make rooms good for a living.

It also has nothing to say about your photography, your typography, your color palette, or any of the decisions you agonized over for a fortnight before you signed the design off.

Where your trade lands

Your trade passes.

I’d stopped being surprised by that long before I got to the end of this dataset, because 83.1% of the interior design websites I audited clear those checks, a result that puts the trade 5 of 47 against everyone else I audit, and stands as the strongest thing this business does anywhere I have looked.

Which makes sense the second you think about who builds these sites.

Designers hire designers. Nobody here is running a homepage a cousin knocked together in 2011 and never touched again. You look at things for a living, and you couldn’t leave a broken layout up if you tried.

There’s a second reason, and it’s less flattering. Almost every ready made template sold in the last decade arrives already rearranging itself for a narrow screen, so your builder inherited the pass rather than earning it, and so did mine. Psychologists are sitting on the same borrowed pass, and their sites were not built by people who look at things for a living.

The average across everything I audit is 78%, and I want to be honest about what that gap is worth to you. It has never once put a job in your calendar.

Passing is the floor. Every trade’s customers own phones.

So what did you imagine you were buying, when a stranger offered to make your site mobile friendly for a monthly fee?

The part I take back

Then I open the same site the way a client would, standing outside on cell data with the wifi off, and I stop behaving like an auditor.

The page fits. Lovely.

The page also takes its time. These sites average 59 out of 100 for how fast they turn up on a phone, a whisker off the 58 I get across every site I run that test on, and ordinary is a strange place to sit when the thing you sell is a photograph.

Would you wait for it? You would, because it’s yours. She won’t, because it isn’t.

Even that isn’t the part that bothers me most.

A mobile check is a question about the page. Everything that decides whether you get hired is a question about the woman holding it, which is the whole of what makes a site usable and none of what a scanner grades.

What she does at half past eleven

Picture her properly.

She has a house she’s tired of, she couldn’t sleep, and she found you at twenty past eleven on a Tuesday. She’s been through your whole portfolio. She loved the green kitchen and the one with the awful staircase you rescued.

She’s decided. So what does she do now?

On most of the sites I opened, her choices are a phone number she is not going to ring at that hour and an email address she’d have to copy out by hand into another app. So she puts the phone face down and tells herself she’ll sort it tomorrow.

Tomorrow she has a job, a school run and no memory of your studio’s name.

Only 18.0% of interior design homepages carry a form she could have filled in right then, and I’d put money on the gap between your busy months and your quiet ones hiding somewhere inside that one number.

Nobody is covering themselves in glory here. Small business homepages manage 28%, which is a poor showing across the board, and the trade selling the most personal service on my whole table is the one making it hardest to start the conversation.

Why would that be? I have a theory and you won’t enjoy it.

A form feels like a shop counter, and this business runs on introductions. You don’t want a stranger’s kitchen, you want the right stranger’s kitchen. So the site gets built to be admired instead of used, and it does that job beautifully.

Why you keep getting asked about phones instead

Because a phone fault is the thing a stranger can scan for.

An agency runs an automated test against your address, screenshots the red bit, and has it in your inbox before lunch. Nobody can scan for a woman who gave up on you at half eleven, and nobody is ever going to email you about her.

She took her tired house to the studio underneath you, and I’d bet that has cost you more work this year than any squished headline ever did.

When I take on an interior design website, the phone layout is the part I worry about least, and I’ll say that to whoever is quoting you for a mobile rebuild. One designer had a whole platform move booked before I got to her, and I argued her out of the entire thing.

I’d rather have the argument about the last screen than the first one.

Do this tonight, late

Wait until it’s properly late and you’re the last one up. That’s the hour your client finds you, so that’s the honest hour to test it.

Open your own website on your own phone, wifi off, and try to hire yourself.

Not look at it. Hire it. Start on the first screen and get all the way through to a message actually sent, the way a stranger would, without ringing anybody and without already knowing where everything lives.

Count the taps. Count the dead ends. Notice the exact second you’d have quit if the company weren’t yours.

Got there in three taps? Go to bed happy, and don’t let anyone sell you a rebuild this year.

Couldn’t finish it at all? Then four minutes in your own bed just told you more about your quiet months than any mobile scan was going to, and if you’d sooner I ran the whole thing and read it back to you, send me the address.

Then go and do the same thing to the designer you’d hate to lose a job to. I dare you to reach her faster than a stranger can reach you.