Feb 19
Building Sites — Digital Homes For Home Designers
Is your current digital home (website) a fixer upper? How to have a beautiful website that showcases your best work and inspires.
Home design professionals are in a rapidly growing sector. To put that in context, the interior design industry alone is set to reach $255.4 billion USD by 2027. From home staging experts to architects, standing out in a competitive market is becoming increasingly challenging. Take Canada’s interior designers, for example. 73% are based in Ontario and British Columbia. That’s a high density market!
With a sea of competitors in an ever-growing market, it’s even more important than ever to build a brand image that reflects professionalism and credibility. Whether you’re an interior designer, home staging expert, architect — or even a property management broker — a beautiful, clean, and intuitive website, plus a consistent online presence are valuable assets for sharing your best and most recent work.
Your website is a window into your world. It’s the first place potential customers will go to see your work, and where they’ll search for home inspiration and ideas. If your website is outdated, hard to navigate or isn’t eye-catching, you’ll lose potential customers to the next competitor whose website ticks all the right boxes — and some.
To stay ahead of the field, you need to build the best digital home for your home design business.
Dig Deep Foundations
Every building needs the right foundations, otherwise the structure will collapse. The same is true for your website. It’s deeply rooted in your brand image.
As brand refresh experts, we know how to take your website to the next level. You need the right tools: messaging and minimalist design. Used correctly, these two things will create a remarkable user experience (UX) for both your existing audience and prospects. And you’ll have a standout online presence to be proud of.
Be honest. Is your current digital home a fixer upper? Maybe you’ve done some work on it yourself. Maybe you’ve had parts of it remodelled by a design professional. Maybe you’ve considered knocking it down and starting again. Does it feel like your home? Does it welcome many visitors? If not, it could be time for a complete renovation!
Pre-made website templates are great for getting started on your own, but they lack the custom design and messaging that uniquely speaks to your ideal customers. Differentiation separates your offering from the competition. A professionally designed website will reflect your brand personality, business values, and your unique approach or service. These things help you stand out in a crowded marketplace, and earn your audience’s trust.
The bottom line is simple: customers want to do business with companies they trust. Even small things can undermine and negatively impact trust. When your brand image and website is outdated, it gives the user a negative perception of your offering. Building and designing a custom brand image helps shape your customers’ perceptions. This builds trust and, over time, advocacy.
You might know competitors who offer the exact same service as you. They might have the same price point, they might even be in the same town, or the same province. Let’s say, for example, you’re one of over 24,000 interior designers in Canada. Differentiating your company from your competitors is essential because product and price are easily replicated.
A Blueprint For Success
At Khula Design Studio, we’ve helped other businesses in a similar space as you to differentiate themselves and create a standout brand image. How do we do it? Here’s our blueprint for success:
- It starts with a proven concept or business. Maybe you’re an existing business that’s been running for a few years or more. Maybe you need a refresh, a positive change, or you’re ready for a complete transformation. Your business guides our design.
- We then get to know who you are, what you do, and, how you service your existing customers. We discover what makes you unique by unpacking your entire business. This is surfaced through a brand script and storytelling, which goes on to inform the custom UX/UI web design phase of the project.
- The design phase then begins. We map out the pages and structure through UX wireframing, finding the right flow for your pages based on the user journey. This tells us what sections or content we want to show and how we want to show it to appeal to your users.
- With the structure mapped out, we infuse the brand identity and visual aspects of the brand to bring the website to life. This includes professional images, walkthrough videos, brand identity, colours, and fonts. We’re like an interior designer picking out textures, colours, fixtures and fittings to bring the home to life. We make it feel like a home instead of house.
- Once the design is in place, and we’re happy with the flow, construction begins. We build out the site in the all-in-one, no-code platform — Webflow. Our interior and home designers and architects love this tool because going forward, it gives them the power to easily update their work or project pages through Webflow’s powerful content management system (CMS). Working in Webflow provides a future-ready website that can evolve and grow with any business.
- As we continue to build, we ensure that the foundations, walls, and structure of your new digital home meet industry best practices. This minimizes defects. Before going live, we do thorough QA and debugging, so there’s no chance of it coming crashing down after we hand over the keys. We also ensure your new digital home has all the right SEO fundamentals, so it gets picked up by search engines.
Our Portfolio Of Digital Homes
We’ve worked with a lot of businesses in the home design and property management sectors. Here are three examples of digital homes we’ve built:
Custom home and renovation design professionals, PROCAD Design, were struggling to keep their WordPress website updated and fresh. They didn’t have time to update it themselves, so they reached out to Khula Design Studio. Read more
A single, well-designed, user-friendly website is worth 20 individual crummy ones. Just ask Kristie at Forty Ninth Living! She built a Wix website for each one of her properties. This took time and money she’d rather be putting into her business. Read more
Award-winning interior architect, Adrian Morris, needed a beautiful and functional website for his new studio, Morris&Co. He wanted to be able to update case studies himself without paying out for developer or agency time — so he came to us. Read more
Building Relationships
One thing that Khula’s founder, Jamie Windell, loves about working with other designers is sharing experiences of the design process, as well as operational tactics! Designing websites has a similar iterative process to home design, from the discovery phase right through to the final design.
Having previously worked for the award-winning interior design agency, Design Partnership Jamie has a deep understanding and appreciation of the industry. Here’s a testimonial we’re particularly proud of:
“Jamie’s positivity and ability to plan, lead, unite and inspire the team at DP not only did wonders for the productivity of the team. In turn, it added immensely to strengthen positive relationships with our clients.” — Callie Van Der Merwe, Principal & Founder DP Australia
Design, after all, should be a collaborative process. Whether you’re renovating a home, building one from scratch, or building a digital home in the form of your website, great design relies on good communication and understanding of people. At Khula Design Studio, we don’t just build great websites, we build lasting relationships. Let’s talk.
Side note: Are you an HGTV fan? We definitely are! We love seeing the before and after transformations and different types of homes and interior design styles. At Khula, we do the same transformations but from a branding perspective — especially the before and after transformations. Here are our top 4 shows:
- Fixer to Fabulous — Dave & Jenny Marrs
- Home Town — Ben & Erin Napier
- Fixer Upper — Chip & Joanna Gaines
- Dream Home Makeover — Studio McGee (Shea & Syd McGee)
Want to discuss how we can help you update your digital home? Book a discovery call today.
Originally posted on www.khula.studio
