5 Best Website Builders for Designing Your Perfect Interior Site
Everything you need to know
how to determine which website platform works best for you?
assess your own needs and plan for future growth
Are you an interior designer who is wondering what is the best platform to host your interior design website? A website should do the following: build a portfolio, generate new business and help you attract new talent. There is a lot of conflicting information around. In this blog post, I want to clear up a few of the questions about which platform is best for interior design websites.
There are a few main platforms for interior designer websites. They include Wix, Squarespace, WordPress and Showit.
Before we begin, let’s discuss what you should look for in an interior design website.
The flexibility of design: As I have discussed on this blog before, the best interior design websites need to be able to suit your interior designs and your interior design styles, you need a website that you can customise to suit your branding and showcases your designs.
Ability to update: Over the lifespan of your website, you need to be able to update your site to reflect any changes you might want to make. You might want to add in information about your services, you might want to add in new pages, update contact details or add new staff members. You really don’t want to be constantly going back to your website designer to update. This can be inefficient, let alone expensive.
Optimise SEO: In order to get traffic to your website, you need to have an SEO strategy. If you are a local designer, for example, your website should be written in such a way that if a potential client googles - the interior designer in (your local area), your name pops up. SEO is a long term strategy and you need to constantly be updating your site to make sure it is optimised for your business. You can hire SEO specialists to do this, but this can be expensive and if your website platform has SEO tools built-in, you can optimize it yourself.
Resources: Choose a website platform where there are a lot of articles and resources that can help you if you have a problem. As a business owner, ultimately you need to take control of your site and actively be able to make updates and solve problems. The more resources that you have to hand the better.
Affordable: Choose a website platform that is affordable. You may in the future want to add in a blog, or a store or be able to take payments. Make sure that you can embed all the functionality that you may want in the future at a reasonable price. I will be writing about some of the possibilities that interior designers might want to consider including in their website which may add to more business as well as increase functionality.
Wix
Wix is targeted towards small business users. It has drag and drop capability so you could update the design yourself. There are hundreds of apps that you can attach to your site so that you can get a lot of functionality. The SEO is built-in.
The biggest drawback with Wix is that if you change your mind about the design you can’t change it without changing the whole template and starting from scratch. This means that if you would like any updates in the future to the design, you must start again.
There are some nice templates available, but the nicer ones are quite expensive and a lot of apps that you might install are paid for, so the cost can add up quickly. It does not have a good e-commerce platform, so if you are considering taking payments, you might be better off choosing a different platform.
WordPress
WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder. It powers around 50% of the websites on the internet. However, its interface can be a bit clunky and difficult to customise. It provides the most flexibility in terms of design, though you may have used a developer to help you customise it. It offers tens of thousands of plugins that allow you to add features to your site- everything from social media tools to photo galleries. The SEO tools and plugins are powerful.
You will have self-host your site, but this is straightforward enough to do. It is probably the cheapest way to manage and host your website.
Showit
Showit is another web-based application that uses WordPress as the basis of its functionality but allows anyone to customize the look and feel of their website. It is very similar to Wix in the way that you can drag and drop blocks. and change the look and feel to however you would like. It beats all the other platforms in terms of design flexibility.
To ensure your SEO is on point in Showit, you must complete the following settings on a Page-by-Page basis inside of Showit. This means that you must include the Title, Meta Description, Text Tags, etc. on every single page (Home, About, Services, etc.) of your website so your readers and search engines know what that Page is all about. This can be a little onerous but it needs to be done. Like other WordPress-based platforms, you can install the Yoast plugin for Blog post SEO.
The biggest drawback to Showit is that it is not really flexible if you want to do things such as add a shop in the future, pull in your Instagram feed or run a blog.
The other disadvantage is that you have to tweak everything on mobile. This means that you have to build 2 sites so it can take a bit more time. Otherwise, if you want a simple website where you can drag and drop content, Showit is an excellent option.
Elementor
Ease of use and an impressive feature set make Elementor one of the best WordPress plugins for creating websites. With Elementor, you can create custom page layouts, add custom widgets, and style your content with ease. Plus, Elementor's live editing feature lets you see your changes in real-time, so you can fine-tune your designs until they're perfect.
Like Showit, Elementor’s drag and drop plugin makes it simple and intuitive. There are a number of templates available. It looks good on mobile and you can really customise web pages here. The sites I have seen make it look a little commercial, but I am sure if you change the colours and fonts you can build a great web presence. Unlike Showit, it is easier to add in a blog and link in a store. You can use WordPress SEO plugins so there is this advantage as well.
Squarespace
You know by now that I use Squarespace. Personally, though the learning curve may be less intuitive than others, once you understand how to use Squarespace, I find it easier to get the results that I want.
Squarespace lets you manage images with ease. You can create large galleries and portfolio blocks and display them in different ways. In addition, you can add in blogs, integrate email marketing and add on a store if you wish. SEO is built-in and images are easy to optimise. It also integrates with digital payment systems such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square. You can easily add custom fonts and change colours to suit your branding and aesthetic. The fact that Squarespace is built using one major template means that you can update your site’s look and feel without losing any data.
There are many different website builders available for interior designers to build the perfect site. While each has its own benefits and drawbacks, it is important to consider your needs, not only now but in the future. Some of the most intuitive website builders such as Showit and Wix will have limitations with regards to features. However, if you are looking for something simple this could be a good choice.
I hope you find this post useful. If you are a designer who is interested in designing their own website, please sign up to the newsletter. A whole course on designing a website in Squarespace, specifically for interior designers will be launched soon. Sign up for the waitlist.
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✔️ looking for more clients✔️ wanting to launch your new interior design biz effectively?
✔️ wanting to upskill your offerings?
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