The Migration I Talked an Interior Designer Out Of

I have sold a migration I didn’t believe in.

Once, a long time ago, to an interior designer who would have been perfectly fine exactly where she was. I had a preference, a quiet month and a tidy story about how her platform was holding her back. All three of those things were about me and none of them were about her.

She paid. We moved her. Nothing happened, nothing bad either, and I’ve thought about that invoice more often than any other one I’ve ever sent.

What Claire arrived with

A designer I’ll call Claire emailed me last winter with a subject line I get about once a fortnight. Do I need to be on WordPress?

A marketing company had told her that her platform was the reason she wasn’t showing up, and quoted her a number for the move that made her put the phone down and sit for a minute.

She’s good, by the way. Twenty years of it, mostly kitchens and whole house work, the sort of portfolio you scroll through twice and then send to your sister.

Her website ran on Squarespace and it had obviously been built by someone who cared.

What the platforms look like in this trade

Interior design is a strange one for that question, and I don’t think Claire knew it. You probably don’t either, because nobody ever tells you what the studios sitting next to you in the results are running.

WordPress leads this trade at 30.9% of the sites I audited, with Squarespace right behind it on 27.1% and Wix a distant third on 13.9%.

Anywhere else it isn’t close. 36.4% of every small business website I checked runs WordPress, and nothing else in the list comes near enough to argue with it.

So Claire had already chosen one of the two answers this business actually gives, years before anybody emailed her about it.

Choosing between a drag-and-drop builder and WordPress is a question about who edits the site on a Tuesday. Claire had answered hers a long time ago.

Those shares never add up to a hundred, and I’d sooner explain why than let you do the sum yourself.

I work the platform out from fingerprints the software leaves behind in a page, so one site can match two platforms at once, and plenty match nothing I can put a name to. If you’d rather see the card I was reading than take my word for it, the explorer on my report prints it: set the industry box to Interior Designers, leave the city box showing every city, and the platform block comes back underneath, with the 1,995 audited websites standing behind every share in it.

What I found when I actually looked

Her platform was the least interesting thing on the page.

I used to read the platform first anyway. Seeing WordPress on a plumber’s site made me skip ahead, and it made me worse at this.

Nothing on that website was counting anything. She could tell me her best month and her worst month and not one single thing about what made them different.

Could you? Not the months, the reason. Most owners I ask have a story about it, and the story is usually the weather or the news.

Analytics is a login and about ten minutes of whoever built the site, and once it’s on you can tell a quiet week from a week when plenty of people read your kitchen page and not one of them wrote to you.

46.2% of interior design sites are running it, which is a strange thing to skip in a business where a single job can be worth more than the whole website was.

58% of small business sites manage it, and that isn’t a proud figure either.

The second thing took me longer to spot. Her last twenty projects existed as photographs and nowhere else.

No write up. Nothing about what the house was like before, what the client had asked for, what it cost to live through, or the name of the town it happened in.

How many finished projects are sitting on your own site like that? Twenty years of solved problems, filed as wallpaper.

28.5% of these sites publish anything at all, which is a shortage I can’t make sense of in a trade sitting on better stories than almost anyone I write for.

Across everything I audit it runs to 37%, and most of those are dutiful little articles nobody on earth wanted to write.

Yours would not be one of those. You have been inside the houses.

Claire links her Instagram from the site, the way 77.0% of this trade does, and the Instagram was doing every bit of the introducing.

Beautiful rooms, no captions worth the name, and a link back to a website that couldn’t tell you where any of them were.

What we changed

Three things, and the platform wasn’t one of them.

1. Turned the counting on, so that in six months the two of us could argue about something real instead of two people’s memories.

2. One project written up a month, properly, with the town in it and the problem she’d been handed.

3. Nothing else. Not the platform, not the theme, not a single photograph.

She wanted to do more. Owners always want to do more, because doing more feels like taking it seriously, and I’ve made a decent living out of saying no to it.

You’d have wanted to do more as well. Everyone does, and your list would have started with the thing your website looks like, because that’s the part you can see from where you sit.

What happened after

Six months isn’t long enough to prove anything, and I’ll say that before you can.

The inquiries changed shape before they changed number. She started hearing from people who mentioned a particular room in a particular town, which is a very different opening line to what do you charge.

Then the number moved as well. The difference now is that she can see it moving, which she couldn’t have done in January whatever anyone had built for her.

Would the migration have done the same? I can’t prove that it wouldn’t. I can tell you the money would have gone before either of us knew a thing.

Two gaming rooms taught me that the slow way. Same games, same prices, opposite years, and the software explained none of the gap between them.

The part I keep chewing on

Interior design websites are most of what I build these days, so agreeing with that marketing company would have made for an easier winter than arguing with it did.

A migration is a lovely thing to sell, because it’s a lovely thing to describe. There’s a before, an after, a folder of screenshots and a date in your calendar when it’s finished.

Have you ever been quoted for one? It arrives sounding like a decision, and decisions feel wonderful when the phone has been quiet.

“Nobody who visits your website leaves a trace” has none of that. It isn’t a project. It doesn’t photograph. No one has ever forwarded it to their husband as an exciting plan for the spring.

Which is more or less why the wrong thing gets bought, and I say that as a man who has sold it.

If you want the version of this where I look at yours instead of Claire’s, send me the address and I’ll go through it for nothing.

Claire’s website is still on the platform she called me about, and she has stopped asking me about it.

So I’ll leave you with the question instead of my answer. If the thing you were about to pay someone to replace turned out to be the only part already doing its job, where would that money have gone instead?

I’ve got my own answer to that and it’s worth exactly what you paid for it. Yours is the one that would change anything.