A website for architects and builders: what it needs to bring in inquiries

Most websites for architects and construction companies are portfolios: full-width renders, a short bio and a contact page. People who plan a house don't hire a portfolio, though. Before they write to anyone, they want four answers: what will it cost, how long will it take, will it work on my plot, and why should I trust you. A website for architects that answers those questions in writing brings inquiries. One that doesn't mostly collects compliments.

We are architects ourselves. CAD ART, our family's licensed practice, has more than 33 years and more than 500 completed architecture projects behind it, and when it needed a site that brings in clients, we built and ranked projektikuce.rs ourselves. This checklist is what that taught us. What we build for practices like yours is on our websites for architects page.

What a website for architects needs

Ten elements, each tied to a question the buyer is already asking. The sections below take them one at a time.

Project pages that answer questions

A project page is a sales page, not a photo album. Put the key facts above the gallery, as text rather than inside an image, so phones, screen readers and search engines can all read them:

• Area: gross and net, per level. For US buyers, square feet next to square meters.
• Rooms, levels and roof: bedrooms, bathrooms, office, garage; single-story, loft or two stories; flat, hip or gable roof.
• Plot requirements: the minimum lot size and width, and whether the design suits a slope.
• Location and status: city or region (never a private client's address), and whether it is built, under construction or a design.
• Scope and price guidance: design, permit drawings, supervision or the whole build, plus a price, a range or a link to the article that explains the price.

On projektikuce.rs every house design shows its area per level, bedrooms and bathrooms, heating and garage, a gallery of renders, and links to related articles and categories. For a builder, the equivalent is a completed-building page: what the client asked for, what you built, how long it took, and photos from the site, not only the finished facade.

Plan catalogs and filters

If you sell house plans or show more than a dozen projects, add filters that mirror how people search: area bands (under 100 m², 100–150 m², 150–200 m²), bedrooms, levels, roof type, garage, basement or pool. Two rules keep filters from hurting you in search:

1. Turn the searches people type into real category pages. "Single-story house plans" or "small house plans under 100 m²" deserve their own URL, a written introduction and links to related articles.
2. Keep filter combinations out of the crawl. Google's guidance on faceted navigation is to keep crawlers away from filtered URLs you don't need in search, for example with robots.txt or URL fragments. On moravamodern.com the filters run in the browser over a static list, so the catalog keeps one canonical URL.

Images that are sharp, fast and findable

Renders and photos are the product, and image search is one of the ways people discover house designs.

• Name files for what they show. Google's image guidelines say a descriptive file name gives it clues about the subject: single-story-house-flat-roof-garage.webp says something, IMG_4821.jpg and render-final-v3.jpg say nothing.
• Write alt text like a caption for someone who can't see the image. Google calls alt text the most important attribute for image metadata. "Two-story house with a flat roof and a covered terrace, street view" beats "house" or a string of keywords.
• Keep image addresses stable. Google recommends referencing each image by the same URL everywhere, so when you update a render, replace the file under the same name instead of creating a new address, and list images in your sitemap.

Floor plans need extra care. Export them large enough to zoom into on a phone, and repeat the room areas as text on the page.

A blog that answers the cost question

The question every buyer asks is the one most architecture sites avoid. A price list may be impossible when the building, the plot and the scope change everything, but silence sends people to whoever does answer.

CAD ART doesn't publish prices either. Instead, projektikuce.rs has one long article on what a house design costs in Serbia: what drives the price, which documents a permit needs, how long each stage takes, and two real designs compared. It had 6,000+ readers in 12 months, more than any other article on the blog. It lives on one permanent address, and older versions with a year in the URL redirect to it. The whole story is in how we grew projektikuce.rs.

Other questions worth an article each:

• What it costs to build a house per square foot or square meter, and what that number leaves out.
• What a building permit requires where you work, and how long it usually takes.
• How to check a lot before buying it: zoning, access, utilities and slope.
• Building a house while living abroad: design, permits and site visits at a distance.

Put the year in the title if it helps, never in the URL, and link every article to the projects it mentions.

City pages done right

People search for an architect or a builder in a specific city, so location pages can work. They are also the quickest way to look like spam: Google's spam policies name doorway pages, near-identical pages for different cities that funnel visitors to one place.

Our test: if you can swap the city name and the page still reads fine, it doesn't deserve to rank. Projektikuce.rs has pages for Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš and Kragujevac, each about that city: where people build, the terrain (plots on the slopes around Niš often call for a basement or a stepped house), the climate and local questions. Add the projects you have completed there.

For your office's own address, a Google Business Profile usually does more than any city page. We cover it in local SEO with Google Business Profile.

An inquiry form that asks about the plot

A form with only name, email and message brings "How much for a house?" The honest reply is "it depends", and you start from zero. A few well-chosen fields turn the first email into a brief.

Projektikuce.rs goes one step further and sells the plot check as a service, with a page that explains what the office needs and what the client gets: a written report within 7 working days. The inquiry arrives with the plot details already in it.

Phone, Viber and WhatsApp next to the form

Many people who build would rather talk than type. In Serbia and the region that often means Viber; for clients elsewhere in Europe, more often WhatsApp. Put tap-to-call, Viber and WhatsApp next to the form and in the footer, on one number, and say when you answer. For clients abroad, add your time zone.

WhatsApp's click-to-chat link is https://wa.me/ plus the full international number, digits only. Viber uses viber://chat?number=.

Fast on the phone

72% of visits to projektikuce.rs come from a phone. Google indexes the mobile version of a site, so what a phone gets is what gets ranked, and architecture sites are heavy: renders, galleries, videos, 360° tours.

Google's Core Web Vitals set the targets: main content visible within 2.5 seconds (LCP), a response to a tap within 200 milliseconds (INP) and a layout that doesn't jump (CLS of 0.1 or less), measured at the 75th percentile of real visits.

• Serve images as AVIF or WebP, in sizes that match the screen.
• Never lazy-load the main image at the top; lazy-load everything below it.
• Give every image its width and height, so nothing jumps while it loads.
• Load videos and 360° tours only on a click. On moravamodern.com a tour makes no third-party requests until the visitor opens it.
• Re-encode heavy hero images. On projektikuce.rs that took the home page hero from 271 KB to 172 KB with no visible difference.

Then test on a mid-range phone over mobile data, not on office Wi-Fi. This kind of work is part of every site we build and of our SEO services.

Licenses, people and completed buildings

A house is the largest purchase most families make, from someone they have never met. Make the proof easy to check:

• Licenses anyone can verify. In the UK only people on the public ARB register may call themselves architects; in the US every state board keeps a roster of licensed architects. Give your number and link to the register.
• Real people. Names, roles and photos of the people who will design or build, not a stock handshake.
• Completed buildings. Photos of finished, lived-in buildings with the city and year. Renders show intent; built work shows you deliver.
• Real reviews only. Link your Google reviews. Never write testimonials yourself or add review stars without real reviews behind them.

Ours is CAD ART, the licensed office our father Boban Milivojević founded: 500+ architecture projects in 33+ years. A record says more than any adjective.

Languages for the diaspora and abroad

Clients don't always live where they build. Projektikuce.rs is in Serbian, and after Serbia its readers come most often from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Montenegro and Austria. Readers abroad don't need a translation; they need content for their situation, so the site has a guide to planning, permits and following a build from abroad.

Buyers from outside the region need a different site. CAD ART's international collection, moravamodern.com, is in English, with areas in m² and ft², prices shown in five currencies, and a note on every plan that a local licensed professional adapts the design. If you add a language:

• Give each language its own URLs and connect the versions with hreflang.
• Adapt units, currency, legal wording and examples instead of translating word for word.
• Add a language only where you can serve clients: a German version pays off if you can answer in German.

Where this checklist comes from

When CAD ART wanted to offer house designs online, the agencies we asked offered templates and vague promises. So we designed, coded and ranked projektikuce.rs ourselves. Its last 12 months:

What we built, how it ranks and the mistakes we undid are in the projektikuce.rs case study and how we grew projektikuce.rs.

Questions architects ask

Should an architect publish prices on the website?

Not necessarily, but you do need to answer the price question: what it depends on, real examples and, if you can, ranges. CAD ART publishes no price list, and its article on what a house design costs is the most-read article on its blog.

How many projects should the portfolio show?

Fewer than you think, with more on each. Ten projects with full data, plans and a real description help a buyer more than fifty thumbnails with a title.

WordPress or a custom-built site?

Both can work. Image handling, speed on a phone and who owns the site matter more than the platform. We compare the two in Next.js or WordPress.

How long before the site brings inquiries from Google?

Months rather than weeks, depending on your market and competitors. Projektikuce.rs is the result of steady work, season after season. A Google Business Profile and a few strong pages that answer real questions are the fastest start.

Sources

• Google Search Central: Image SEO best practices
• Google Search Central: Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs
• Google Search Central: Spam policies, doorway abuse
• Google Search Central: Mobile-first indexing
• web.dev: Web Vitals
• Google Search Central: Localized versions of your pages
• WhatsApp Help Center: How to use click to chat
• Architects Registration Board (UK) · NCARB: Architect license lookup
• projektikuce.rs figures: Vercel Web Analytics, 09/2025–09/2026, rounded down.