Whitelam.Media
Start a projectinfo@whitelam.media
For architecture firms, design studios & built-environment practices

Websites for architecture firms whose work deserves a real platform.

Most architecture sites look great on the project pages and lose the buyer everywhere else. We build the everywhere else with the same care as the work itself.

Brief us on your projectSee the 15 architecture sites we benchmark against
The problem

Why most architecture firm sites underperform.

Architecture firms are the only profession we audit whose project photography is consistently world-class and whose site architecture is consistently weak. The work is shot for monographs. The site is shot from a 2014 WordPress theme. The mismatch is jarring. Five patterns we see almost every time.

  • 01

    Beautiful projects, brutalist UX

    Heavy hero image. Then a navigation that hides everything. Buyers can find one project but never the second.

  • 02

    An 'About' page that says nothing

    Founders' bios as paragraphs of credentials. No point of view about why the practice exists or what it builds.

  • 03

    Project pages without project data

    Hero photo. Caption. Done. No square metres, no client, no budget category, no team credit. Press and procurement both need that data.

  • 04

    No publications, no press, no awards

    Architecture firms publish. Get featured. Win awards. The site rarely shows any of it because nobody's tagging it.

  • 05

    Mobile is an afterthought

    Full-bleed image grids that break on phones. 80% of new-business research happens on mobile. Site loses there.

What we build instead

A site that matches the quality of the practice.

Photography-led but legible. Designed to be navigated by clients, students, journalists and competition juries. Editable by your team without breaking the design.

  • Project page template designed around long-form storytelling
  • Filterable project archive by typology, scale, year and location
  • Practice page with real point of view, not a wall of bios
  • Press, publications and awards index with metadata
  • Lecture, exhibition and event archive (most architecture firms forget this)
  • Team page with current and alumni roster
  • Careers and student opportunities section
  • Photography licensing notice and credit handling
  • RSS / atom feed for journalists who follow the practice
  • 30 days of post-launch optimisation against real traffic

Three sample budgets

What a $12k, $30k and $60k architecture site actually buys.

  1. Practice site6 weeks

    $12k to $22k

    Photography-led project archive, practice page, press and awards index, contact. Editable CMS. The clean, fast rebuild for small to mid-size practices coming off a tired WordPress.

    Best for: Practices with 5 to 30 built projects. 3 to 15 staff. One office. Looking for a step-change in how the work reads online.

  2. Strategic redesign8 to 10 weeks

    $28k to $45k

    Everything above, plus discovery sprint, positioning work, content strategy, copy rewrite, publications archive, lecture and exhibition database, journalist subscription handling.

    Best for: Practices repositioning around a new typology. Awarded studios entering a new market. Practices preparing for a partnership change or generational handover.

  3. Studio platform10 to 14 weeks

    $50k to $85k

    Multi-office or multi-practice platform with shared design system. Research and theory section. Multilingual support. Investor or partnership-track audience surfaces. Integration with monograph publication workflows.

    Best for: International practices with offices in multiple cities. Practices with active publishing programmes. Studios at the scale of OMA, Snøhetta, Foster + Partners.

These are real ranges from real projects. We don't do hourly billing. We don't hide costs in change orders. The number we quote is the number on the invoice.

Adjacent work

Work in adjacent design-led verticals.

We work with design-conscious clients across multiple sectors. The instincts that make an architecture site work (photography-first, restraint, content depth) carry across.

The process

Six weeks from kick-off to launch.

Architecture firm websites typically take three to nine months when scoped against a print-monograph workflow. We compress this by separating the brief from the build, doing real discovery work in two weeks, and shipping a smaller site that grows over time rather than a huge site that ages instantly.

  1. 01 · StepWeek 1

    Discovery

    Working session with the operator (not just marketing). Audit of the existing site, competitors and search behaviour. The brief comes out of this week, not into it.

  2. 02 · StepWeek 2

    Strategy & content

    Positioning. Architecture. Copy for the homepage and the project case study template. Photography brief. Sector pages mapped to buyer search intent.

  3. 03 · StepWeeks 3 & 4

    Design

    Visual system, page designs, brand application. Designed in code rather than Figma so the team sees the real artefact, not a flat mockup.

  4. 04 · StepWeeks 4 & 5

    Build

    Next.js production build. CMS configured. Project case studies migrated and rewritten where needed. Analytics, schema, Search Console wired.

  5. 05 · StepWeek 6 plus 30 days

    Launch & optimise

    Go live. Daily review of real user behaviour for the first 30 days. Two or three rounds of changes against what the data shows. Most agencies stop at launch. We don't.

Frequently asked

Questions architecture practices tend to ask first.

How do you handle photography licensing and credit?
Project pages include configurable photo credits per image, automatic alt text for screen readers, and a per-image rights flag in the CMS so your team can mark images as press-free, licensed-only or embargo. This is one of the most-skipped details and one of the most consequential when a journal calls.
Can we run the site in multiple languages?
Yes. Next.js supports multilingual routing natively. We've shipped sites with EN/ES/FR/DE language switching. Translation workflows can plug into your existing tool (memoQ, Trados, Lokalise) or be managed manually in the CMS.
What about competitions and unbuilt projects?
Project archive supports a 'built / unbuilt / competition' filter so buyers and juries can find both. We've thought a lot about how to surface speculative work without diluting the built record.
Will our existing project library migrate cleanly?
Most architecture firms' project content is in InDesign or a static folder structure. We bring it into a structured CMS as part of the project. Migration of 50 to 150 projects is included in the Standard tier. Larger archives or non-standard data we handle as a separate scope.
Do you publish to Archdaily, Dezeen, Architizer feeds?
Yes. Each project page renders a clean structured-data feed that publications can pick up automatically. We've made this work for firms whose work gets picked up by Dezeen on a weekly cadence.
Can we keep WordPress?
If your existing site works and your team enjoys editing it, keep it. We can do a design-only refresh against your existing CMS in 4 weeks for $10-15k. We tell clients honestly when a full rebuild isn't the right call.
Let's talk

What are you trying to make happen?

Most projects start with a 15-minute conversation. We listen to the brief, ask the right questions and tell you straight what we can handle and how. No retainer required to start.

Or email us directly at info@whitelam.media.