Creating An Interior Designer’s Website With WordPress

A simple, easy to follow guide, to help you create an interior designer’s website on your own, with WordPress!

 

Every business nowadays, whether small or big, requires a business website for creating an online presence. Today, creating a business website has become an integral part of business building.

Especially, for a creative business like Interior/exterior designing, you need a website to reach more people and showcase your work to a wider audience.

This means more opportunities. And considering that website building has become so easy and affordable, you should definitely have one.

A CMS like WordPress is great for professionals like Interior designers, artists, and painters to create their online portfolio.

Why should you have a Interior designer’s website

The competition is tough and you can only survive if you use all the resources and tactics. You may have an Interior designing capability with the best experience and accomplishments. But it can only get better when it is promoted properly. There are so many reasons to create an Interior designer’s website.

• A website can let you express freely, you can create any number of pages, promote your services, showcase your projects, write and share blogs, display offers, etc.
• It helps you reach a larger audience, without geographical barriers
• You need to be found by the people online. If a prospect client is searching for a service similar to yours, your services need to be listed there.
• Lets you receive and answer the visitor’s queries online, through your website. Also helps the clients easily contact you.
• It can act as your base for the digital marketing tactics, so double the advantages.
• You can build a client base and collect their emails and other details through forms on your website

Before you ask why create a website, you should think – “why not?”. Because there are so many advantages of creating a website for your Interior designing firm.

Creating an Interior Designer’s website

Considering all the advantages of creating an Interior designer’s website, you should start creating one for yourself. And what more, these days creating a website is very simple and affordable.

Without even a bit of technical knowledge, you can start and build your own website, just the way you want it. In this tutorials, we will be using all the tools designed specifically for the noobs and people with little to no technical knowledge.

Choosing the Platform

When it comes to website building, there are a number of choices to make. All these choices matter a lot because the performance as well as ease of maintaining and flexibility depends on these choices.

And obviously, the most important is choosing the website building Platform. For this tutorial we will be using WordPress to create an interior designer’s website:

The following are the reasons for choosing WordPress to create an interior designer’s website:

• WordPress is free, easy to use & open source
• Lets you create beautiful responsive Interior designer’s websites
• Niche plugin and theme designs to choose from
• Abundant WordPress Plugins to easily add new features to your website
• An SEO friendly platform for better visibility of your Interior designer’s website
• Abundant and easily available tools for promotions
• Easy to update and customize

Choosing the Domain name, Host and Theme

Another important decisions in the line are: The Domain name, the name that represents your website on the internet. The Hosting space, to host your website on, and the WordPress theme to create your interior designer’s website.

Domain name and hosting space

The domain name is the identity of your website on the internet. It is essentially a alphabetic name assigned to the numeric id of your website. The domain name is like the permanent address of your website on the internet. Your visitors will identify and easily reach your website using the domain name.

On the other hand, the hosting space is the server space for your website’s files on the internet. Here’s a complete guide on how to choose the domain name and hosting for your WordPress website.

We recommend Bluehost, for your domain and hosting requirements because it is affordable and has a great up time and support service in case you should need them.

WordPress Theme

When using WordPress for website building, you get a complete package of website design and features in the form of WordPress themes. You can create a WordPress website quick and easy using the themes:

There are so many WordPress themes available with different designs and different features. They even have different flexibility and customization possibilities. You can choose one as per your requirements.

The following are some of the best options to create a fully functional, feature packed and professional look Interior designer’s website:

Ombrello Theme

Ombrello is a creative multipurpose theme that you can use for any purpose of your choice. It is very flexible and using the theme and the pre designed pages, you can create a website of your choice easily. You can use this theme to create a beautiful, professional looking website for your interior designing firm/business.

The theme comes with pages based on the Elementor page builder, and therefore, they can be easily customized using the easy drag and drop option. The theme is so easy to use that you will actually enjoy building your site with the Ombrello theme. There’s a portfolio section too using which you can display your completed projects.

Get this theme

Innovation WordPress Theme

Innovation is a construction theme aimed for creating construction website. You can use this theme for number of purposes.

With Innovation, you get to choose from the 5 homepage layouts. Design your web-pages with the Visual composer page builder. With the Redux Framework, you can manage your website with easy options. You can choose the sidebars or create new ones. If you want to sell stuffs online, use the WooCommerce plugin. The theme comes with RTL support.

Get this theme

Spectrum Theme for WordPress

Spectrum is a multipurpose Construction WordPress theme. The theme can be used to create a website for all the businesses related to construction.

Spectrum has demos dedicated to different purposes. These purposes are : Electrician, plumbing, Online shop for tools, roofing, interior designer, etc. It has some premium WP plugins in bundled. You get Visual Composer for creating page layouts by dragging and dropping elements. There are sections for parallax images and video backgrounds. Also, you get unlimited blog and portfolio layout options. The theme can be totally customized using the backend options.

Get this theme

Renovation WordPress Theme

Renovation is a feature rich theme. The theme is designed for a simple construction company website that displays all the business details.

Renovation is responsive and has a retina ready and high-resolution graphics support. It has a clean design. You can use the theme for creating any construction related website. You can set the color of the site. It can be customized with easy options.

Get this theme

Installing the Software and Initial steps

So all the important decisions regarding your website are now made. It is time now to start with website building. To do so, you will need to login to your hosting control panel, and use the hosting space by installing WordPress there.

Installing WordPress

Most of the hosting providers will let you install WordPress with just one click, or let you choose an option that installs the latest version of WordPress automatically.

If there are other steps involved, the hosting company will definitely assist you on starting your WordPress website easily.

Installing WordPress  Theme

WordPress themes are so easy to use. Especially if you get them from reliable theme companies. The one’s mentioned in the beginning of this tutorial come with easy install feature to give you a quick start.

The WordPress dashboard will give you an easy option to upload your Interior Designer’s theme’s zip file. Once installed you can activate your theme.

The next step generally is where you are supposed to include the sample data. We highly recommend installing the sample data, or using one of your theme’s pre designed demo for a quick start and better understanding.

Branding and Publishing the most important pages

These are the small but vital details that should be taken care of as a part of the initial setup of your website. All these steps will gradually turn a WordPress theme template, into a website that precisely represents your business.

Branding your interior designer’s website

Since your Interior Design business website is your brand representation online, make sure you properly re-brand the theme.

Start by uploading your own logo. Use original images, and page headings. Customize the important sections to represent and express your values and services.

And don’t forget to customize and personalize the header and footer of your website as they appear on every page of your website and will a lasting impact on a visitor’s mind.

Building all the Important Pages/sections

A successful website is nothing but a bunch of well designed web pages, that represents a purpose and deliver some value to the visitors.

As a website owner, you can sit down and make a list of all the pages and content you want to publish through your website. Start with the most important pages. Here, we have listed a few common pages that are important for any kind of business website.

Homepage: The most important page of your website. Optimize it to the maximum to make sure it represents your entire website. 

A homepage should have clear menus, that help the visitors to find the content they are looking for, it typically consists of contact information (in the footer) or contact page’s link. The Homepage can also have a Call to Action section if you want user action.

On the other hand, the homepage of your Interior designer’s website should have proper, high quality and optimized images to represent your business. You can include multiple banner of the homepage to draw your visitor’s attention to the facts/pages you want.

The Contact Page

Definitely one of the most important pages for a business website like an Interior designer’s website. This page is so useful yet so easy to build.

Generally, the best of the WordPress themes, will come with a built in contact form to be configured, so that you can start receiving business inquiry right away.

However, if your WordPress theme doesn’t come with a built in contact form, there are so many contact form plugins you can choose from to create and include contact forms into your interior designer’s website.

Also read this article on how to create an effective and useful contact form on your website.

The About Page

This is the page where you can get personal. Build a personal connection with the visitor by telling them about yourself.

This page can be designed to be as interesting as you want. Start with how you started, what drives you, how passionate your staff is. You can even put the pictures of your staff. It can somehow help you build trust amongst the customers.

Online portfolio

Your Interior design business website is the best way to showcase your work, or convey all the services you provide. Along with your business website, it also becomes your professional online portfolio.

You can choose a WordPress theme with portfolio option if you wish to make the best of your business website.

Menus

Menus on your website are the primary means of navigating and finding the desired page for your visitors. The menus are generally in the header part because of their importance to help the visitors.

Many things like the exit rates, the session duration and the user engagement depend on the effectiveness of the menus on your website. Therefore, they should be designed thoughtfully and logically.

You can design menus by listing out all the important pages and all the links that you want to be the part of the primary navigation of your Interior designing business website. Once you know what pages are to be included, you can divide your menu items as main menu as well as sub menu items and then structuring them logically.

Adding Content to your website

Content is the king, definitely!

Even when it comes to successful websites, the content is just as important as a beautiful and clean design. The pages on your website can only deliver their messages clearly through proper content.

Use all the tactics, use all the media to create content that is useful for the visitors. Each of your website’s page should answer the user queries, solve their dilemma, and deliver some information or knowledge.

Just be very honest when adding content to your website. Use different media like Images, quotes, videos as well as text in different forms to create engaging content on your site.

Promoting your Interior designer’s website

When you have your website live, and it is the time you expect people to visit your website. However, gaining traction is not as easy as it seems.

Creating a website is easy, but promoting and maintaining it is where the real struggle lies.

Now that we have an idea about the process of creating a fitness WordPress website, it’s time to promote your website using different mediums and channels.

Paid advertising

Advertising is perhaps the easiest way to promote your website if you are ready to invest. You can approach your local media, relevant websites for banner advertising space, etc. You can even invest in services like Google AdWords to target the keywords relevant to your business, and bring targeted traffic.

Social media Optimization

This is a free and very effective way to promote your website, and spread your message into the social groups. It is easy and simple. Create your social media presence and get started with the promotions through different social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Social media is a great way to get in touch with a large number of people easily. You can use the social connection to spread a word about your website. You can write useful tips about the interior designs, and share them to make your site more useful. Besides, social media can be one of the best places to promote events, as well as discount offers.

SEO for organic traffic

Consider this one of the most important part of your promotional strategy, even though it won’t bring overnight results and an upsurge of traffic. Start by choosing an SEO friendly theme, using SEO plugins like Yoast SEO to optimize your content at page level. Besides, you can create useful content for better visibility.

Investing on SEO, is always a good idea. Good ranks on the search engine will help you improve the ranks which will help you obtain more traffic.

More about promoting a website

Maintenance

With proper promotions, you can sure get the desired traction, but to retain it, your website should be properly maintained.

There can be different maintenance routines based on the type of content you have added to your website. But here are some of the common maintenance tasks that you will need to perform for a WordPress website.

Updates

It is a good practice to keep your software updated. An update may include a new feature, a security patch, or a bug fix. Therefore, for a WordPress website, you should always keep the platform updated. Whenever a new version of WordPress is released, make sure you update it.

The same goes for your WordPress theme and whichever plugins you use in your website. However, before updating your website, make sure that you have a proper backup saved, just in case of a mishap.

Backups

What if your website crashes, it is attacked, or an update ruins it? You should have regular backups of your website always. The following are the situations where backups serve as life savers:

Data loss: Due to some security issues, or any such other instances where you end up losing data of your website partially or completely, backups are at your rescue.

Security issues: Malware attacks or security intrusion may be risk for your website and disrupt the services on your interior designer’s website.  Here, backups will help you quickly restore your website’s normal functioning.

Updates went wrong: Sometimes it’s not external issues, but your own actions that may cause disruption to your business website. Backups, can help you find a quick way back to the normal functioning of your website.

A Backup can be restored quickly and you can save yourself from a lot of loss with the backup you have at your hand. Backups are essentially the “lifeboats” that to keep aboard in times of crisis. We recommend using BlogVault for backups.

Website Cleanup and content updation

Over time, you will have a lot of unessential pages, images, as well as plugins accumulated in your website. This is why your website needs a proper cleanup once in a while.

Cleaning up your website will not just free up space for useful things but also make your website faster and help your website perform efficiently. Afterall, there’s no reason you should keep useless files and images on your website to consume the server space and processing resources.

Now when the unnecessary items are removed, you can focus on optimizing the existing items. You should make sure that your website’s content still makes sense.

One of the most common maintenance routines for any kind of website is adding new content and updating it regularly. Updating content includes:

• Adding new content in form of pages, posts, widgets as and when required
• Removing old outdated content from your website

SEO audits

SEO is important and the rules keep changing. The thing that helped you have the first rank on the SERP may change and you may see your traffic plummeting anytime. The trick is to make sure that your website is regularly checked for their efficiency

What helps is to make sure that your content is SEO friendly according to the latest SEO norms. You can use a tool like Google Analytics, and other SEO tools to monitor and optimize your Interior designer’s website for SEO.

Regular Security Monitoring

For a website like an Interior designer business website, which generally doesn’t have the features like payment processing, or a lot of user’s personal details, security is not a big concern.

However, it is not a thing to be totally ignored too. Due to security issues, your website’s normal functioning can be disrupted. Or a security breach can result in a hacked website, redirecting towards misleading urls, loss of information, and disruption of service and damaged reputation.

Speed Optimization

Speed of your Interior Design Business website is important because of the following important reasons.

• A slow website disappoints the visitors, making them leave and browse for information on some other site
• Website speed is a ranking factor and effects the ranks of your website
• Visitors leaving your website again adversely effects your website’s visibility and ranks

You can use a tool like Google Page speed insights to check the speed of your website and fix it. Read this: How to speed up your WordPress website?

Wrapping up

Website building has become easier with these website building platforms and the page builders. Anyone can now have their own website.

And with time and experience, you can learn more and more about what works and what doesn’t for your website. Just be experimental with your website and keep trying new things to understand what can keep you on top.

You can do so much with a business website, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have it. So are you ready to explore a whole new world of opportunities by creating your own Interior designing business website?

We can help you start with a free theme install and setup