Your Interior Design Studio’s Name Is Not a Headline

Last week I spent an afternoon opening interior design websites and writing down the biggest line of text at the top of each homepage. Nothing clever about the method. Just the words, one studio per line.

Most rows said the name of the studio.

A good few said Welcome, or Home, or Portfolio. One said Est. 2004. Two said nothing at all, because the top of the page was a photograph of a sitting room with the name underneath it in small gray capitals.

I’d run the same exercise on plumbing companies a fortnight earlier, and that list read like a phone book. Drain cleaning. Emergency plumber. The name of the town, twice.

Neither list is beautiful. Only one of them is doing a job.

If a woman had never heard of either business, which of those two lists would you rather your own line was sitting in?

Where the trade came out

Then I went through all forty seven trades I audit, best headline down to worst, and interior design came out 46 of 47, with 60.3% of these homepages carrying one.

I’ve been arguing about that result with designers ever since, which is the only reason I’m able to rank the arguments.

The line itself

Every decent shop on a high street paints one line across the front. Not the owner’s surname, and not the year the place opened. The line tells a stranger walking past what she can buy inside.

Your homepage is allowed exactly one of those, tagged H1 in the code so a search engine can tell it apart from all the decoration around it.

Without looking, do you know what yours says right now?

73.7% of everything I audit gets that line written, so it isn’t a difficult job that your trade happens to fail. It’s an easy job your trade skips.

Four answers come back at me when I raise it. I’ve put them worst first, because the last one is the only one I can’t argue with.

4) “Nobody reads it anyway”

Your clients don’t, no.

By the time a woman is your client she has been in your car, walked three houses you’ve finished and met your upholsterer. She could not care less what your homepage says across the top of it.

The people who read that line have never met you. They read it in a list of six studios, on a phone, in about the time it takes to decide whether a restaurant looks any good.

I once watched a homeowner do exactly that across her own kitchen island, phone in one hand and a coffee in the other, and the speed of it felt insulting on my clients’ behalf.

She isn’t reading it the way you read your own website. She’s skimming six of them at once and hunting for a reason to close five, because closing five is how a tired person makes a decision at the end of a long evening.

How much time do you imagine she gives the top of your page before she decides you aren’t the one?

It holds up for the clients you already have, and those were never the ones costing you anything.

3) “The photographs say it better than words could”

They do say it better. They say it later.

I’ve made this argument badly for years and I think I’ve finally got it right. A finished room is the most persuasive thing you own, and I’d never talk you out of putting one at the top. But a photograph answers whether you’re any good. It can’t answer whether you work anywhere near her, whether you take on a single room or only whole houses, or whether the sort of house she owns is the sort of house you like.

Your picture wins the argument. The line is what gets you into the argument in the first place.

And what happens when the room she’s looking at is the loveliest thing on her screen, and she still has no idea whether you’d take her house on?

Half right, and the half it’s right about happens second.

2) “My web designer handles the technical side”

He did handle it. That’s the annoying part of this one, and I say so as one of the people being blamed.

Furniture turns up at a job with labels taped to the back of every piece, telling the crew which room each one belongs in. Nobody in the family will ever read those labels, and the day falls apart without them.

Web pages carry the same sort of quiet labeling for search engines, called schema markup, and 75.4% of these sites have it in place, a shade ahead of the 70.5% I get across everything I check.

You didn’t type a word of it. It arrived switched on, or it came bundled with the theme, or your builder ticked a box on a Wednesday afternoon and had forgotten about it by Thursday.

The heading is the one item on that whole list which never arrives already filled in. Every builder in the world hands you the empty slot, and not one of them can put a sentence inside it, because the sentence has to come from a person who understands what the business is for.

Charities land in the identical spot one line further down, where the people who care most about words leave the sentence under their own name to a machine.

So when did anybody last ask you what that line ought to say?

It holds up right up to the part that needed you, and then it stops dead.

1) “All my work comes from referrals and Instagram”

Now we’re talking. That one is true, and I think it explains the whole row on its own.

A referral arrives already knowing your name, because a friend said it out loud in a kitchen. She doesn’t need a sign over the door. Someone walked her through it.

The homepage then gets built to confirm what she has already been told, and confirming is a completely different job from introducing. Design for the first and you get the second one wrong for free.

So who does the introducing for the woman nobody sent?

Law firms answer that question by writing down the explanations they already hand out for free in consultations, which is the same material you give away in a first meeting about a kitchen.

You built one anyway. 90.6% of these businesses have a website at all, which is 8 of 47 and ahead of nearly every trade I check.

So you didn’t think it was pointless. You paid for it, you fussed over the type, you argued about the photographs.

You stopped one line short of it working for a stranger. Why would you spend all of that and skip the cheapest part?

True, and it explains everything except why you’d leave it that way once you knew.

What that one line does to the rest of your website

None of it makes these bad websites. The trade sits at 72 out of 100 on my industry table, a fair middle of the pack, and most of what I opened last week was better looking than the sites I get paid to build.

Designers ring me about phones more than anything else, too, and the phone is the part this trade already handles better than almost everyone. The headline is the part nobody calls about.

The interior design sites I’d hold up as good all do the same unglamorous thing at the top of the page, and not one of them looks any cheaper for it.

The words are usually plain to the point of dull. A kind of work, a kind of client, a place. Then the photograph, doing what photographs have always done.

Would you notice a sentence like that sitting above a beautiful room? Probably not, and the not noticing is exactly what makes it work on a stranger who arrived with her guard up.

When someone hires me for an interior design website, that line gets settled before a single color goes near the page, and I’ve lost the argument about it more than once.

If you’d rather hear what yours currently says before you touch it, send me the address and I’ll read it back to you, along with what I’d put there instead.

Who this wasn’t written for

Are your next eighteen months already spoken for out of two clients’ address books? Then close the tab. Your homepage is a formality and we both know it.

It wasn’t written for the designer whose work is specific enough that the four people who can afford it already know her name.

It wasn’t written for anyone hoping to hand this particular job off to a contractor, either. The sentence has to come from whoever understands which clients she wants more of, which ones she’s quietly tired of, and what the difference between those two has cost her over a decade.

I wrote it for the designer who’s good, who’s a lot quieter than she should be, and who has never once been told that the first thing her website says is the name of her own company.