It is 3:40 on a Tuesday. An architect is on a call with a residential client about a coastal house in its third round of revisions. The client asks if she has someone for the landscape. She names a firm she worked with on a school project four years ago. She says she’ll send a link after the call. She opens the bookmark in a tab while the client is still talking.
The next thirty seconds decide whether the link goes out. If the homepage opens with a slow hero video, or the project grid looks like it did in 2019, or she can’t see in one scroll whether the firm still does residential work, the tab gets closed. The link never goes.
Most landscape architecture websites are designed for the curious browser. The reader who matters most is the architect with the bookmark.
What she is scanning for
She is not reading the homepage. She is scanning it, the way anyone scans a familiar object to check that it still works. She’s looking for three things, in roughly this order, and she gives the site about ten seconds to deliver them.
First, confirmation that the firm still does the kind of work she described on the phone. If she said “coastal house” and the front page is council streetscapes, the referral cools before it leaves her desk. Second, confirmation that the principal she worked with is still there. A team page that loads in one click, with the same faces and names, does more for a referral than a redesigned homepage. Third, a signal that the firm handles the scale of the brief. A six-hundred-square-metre garden and a forty-hectare masterplan are not the same business. She is checking which one this is.
None of these are creative questions. The site either answers them in ten seconds or it doesn’t.
What scanning actually looks like
Eyes move down the left edge of a page in an F shape, picking up the first few words of each block and the first image in the first row. On a project index, the reader sees the top-left thumbnail, the label under it, and the first two thumbnails of the second row. Almost nothing below the second row registers in the first pass.
Which means the project index is the highest-leverage page on the site. Not the homepage. The referring architect skips the homepage on the third visit anyway. Sortable by project type, labelled in plain words, with thumbnails that show what the project actually is, the index lets her find a project like her client’s in fifteen seconds and forward the link with a sentence about it. An unsortable grid of sunset shots, ordered by date, asks her to do the firm’s filtering for it. She won’t.
The hero photograph on the homepage is doing the least work of any image on the site. The thumbnail on the project index is doing the most.
The reservoir
Every reader arrives with a finite amount of patience for the site. Each piece of friction takes a sip. A homepage carousel that auto-rotates before she’s read the first slide takes a sip. A three-second load on a project page takes a sip. A contact form behind two clicks takes a sip. Hover-only navigation that hides labels until the cursor is in the right place takes a sip. An autoplay video with sound takes the whole glass.
The referring architect has the smallest reservoir of any reader on the site. She has the least invested in being there. She is doing a favour for a client, in the last fifteen minutes of a long call, and she will close the tab the moment the site asks her to work harder than the favour is worth.
Conventions help here. A logo top-left that links home. A navigation bar with the words Work, About, Contact, in that order or close to it. A project page laid out like every other project page she has ever opened. Reinventing the project grid costs the firm the reader who was most likely to send work its way.
Most landscape architecture websites are designed for the curious browser. The reader who matters most is the architect with the bookmark.
The hardest part of designing for the referring architect is that she never tells the firm she came. She closes the tab, sends the link in a follow-up email, and goes back to her own work. A week later an inquiry arrives from her client, who mentions her by name. The thank-you note goes to the architect. The website that did the confirming gets no credit at all, which is exactly the sign that it’s doing its job.