27 February 2026
5 questions every client asks your website
A municipal planner has six tabs open. She’s shortlisting firms for a streetscape tender due Friday. Two tabs close immediately: one is a full-screen photo carousel with no text, the other takes four seconds to load a video of a rainforest. A third has beautiful project photography but no descriptions, no locations, no indication of whether the firm has ever touched a streetscape. She closes that one too.
Across town, a developer scouting firms for a mixed-use project does the same thing in half the time. He doesn’t care about your design philosophy. He wants to see that you’ve delivered something similar, on schedule, at a relevant scale. Different client, same website, same five questions, and the same silence where answers should be.
I’ve spent ten years in digital strategy and UX, building websites for professional services firms. Recently I turned that lens on landscape architecture. I reviewed 36 firm websites across seven countries, sourced from professional award winners, national institute directories, Landezine features, and Google search. The pattern was consistent: firms producing excellent work have websites that fail to communicate it to the people who need to find it, whether that’s a public agency running a procurement process or a developer scanning for a firm that can move fast.
Most of these sites don’t answer the five questions clients are already asking.
1. What do you actually do?
Most homepages open with a full-bleed hero image or an autoplaying carousel. They look like magazine covers. They communicate almost nothing. Carousels are worse than static images because they take control away from the visitor. The content moves before anyone finishes reading it, and whatever isn’t on the first slide might as well not exist.
This matters more for landscape architecture than for other design professions. A photo of a building tells you what the building is. A photo of a landscape doesn’t. An aerial of a courtyard garden and an aerial of a regional park can look almost identical. Without text, a visitor can’t tell what you do, where you work, or at what scale.
The highest-scoring firm in the review was an Australian practice whose homepage opens with one image and a plain-language sentence explaining who they are and what they specialise in. No carousel, no ambiguity.
The fix
Pick one strong image. Drop the carousel. Add a plain-language descriptor above the fold, not a tagline, something like: “We design parks, campuses, and public spaces across Australia.” Without it, visitors who can’t figure out what you do in five seconds move to the next firm.
2. Can I see work like mine?
Once a visitor knows what you do, they want to see projects that resemble theirs. This is how procurement works. Owners hire based on demonstrated competence in similar project types. A council shortlisting firms for a park masterplan evaluates your park projects. A developer planning a mixed-use precinct looks for commercial or multifamily housing work. A homeowner looking at gardens doesn’t care about your highway interchange. If visitors can’t find the relevant work quickly, they assume it doesn’t exist.
What they find instead are flat grids of thumbnails, all given equal weight, sometimes sorted alphabetically, sometimes by date. A visitor scanning a portfolio of 40 equally-sized images has to inspect each one to find something relevant. Most won’t. Filters by project type (parks, residential, streetscape, institutional, commercial) and one featured project at the top would let visitors self-select in seconds. Almost no firm in the review did this. The irony is that most firms already organize their work this way internally. Project sheets, qualification documents, and tender submissions are all assembled by project type. The website is the one place this structure disappears.
One US firm did something different. On a project page, they included thermal imaging showing measurable cooling effects from their planting design. That’s not a pretty picture. That’s proof of performance. The most valuable outcomes of landscape architecture are often the ones you can’t photograph: stormwater capacity, microclimate improvement, biodiversity gains. If your project pages are photos only, you’re leaving your strongest evidence off the table.
The fix
Add filters by project type so visitors can find relevant work in seconds. Then treat each project page as a short case study. The brief, the constraints, the approach, what was delivered. The firm whose projects read as stories, not slideshows, is the one that gets the call.
3. What happens if I hire you?
Most prospective clients, especially private-sector ones, have never hired a landscape architect before. When someone can’t picture what happens after they reach out, the easiest option is not reaching out. The status quo wins. This was the lowest-scoring category in the entire review, and probably the most expensive gap on any firm’s website.
When the process is invisible, the enquiry feels like a commitment. When it’s visible, it feels like a next step. Three firms scored full marks here: two in New Zealand and one in the US. None had fancy websites. What they had was a page walking through each phase with a sentence on what happens and what the client receives at each stage: an initial site walk and conversation, a design program documenting goals and budget, concept design with plans and imagery, developed design with materials and planting, construction documentation, and, where offered, construction observation. That was enough.
The fix
A simple process page that answers “what happens next?” Name the phases. Say what you deliver at each one: a concept plan, a planting schedule, a set of construction drawings. You’re not locking in a scope of services. You’re showing someone that you’ve done this before, that there’s a clear path through it, and that the first step is just a conversation.
4. Should I trust these people?
Most About pages in the review read like this: “We are passionate about creating inspiring outdoor spaces that enrich communities.” That’s the landscape architecture version of “your call is important to us.” Visitors don’t trust it because there’s nothing to trust. Vague language isn’t neutral; it reads as evasion.
“Award-winning” is meaningless. “2024 AILA Award of Excellence, Riverside Precinct masterplan” is meaningful. But awards aren’t what matter most. What matters is evidence from satisfied owners. Repeat clients, named testimonials, and specific references are the engine that sustains most practices. A single quote from a council project manager or a developer who came back for a second project is more persuasive than anything you write about yourself, because it demonstrates the thing clients actually evaluate: that you delivered on something similar and the people who hired you were happy with the result.
Most firms bury this evidence on a single page or leave it out entirely. When a prospective client is comparing two firms with similar portfolios, the one that proves competence through other people’s words, not its own, gets the shortlist.
The fix
Name specific awards with project names. Add client testimonials in their own words, tied to specific projects. Put both on the homepage, project pages, and contact page. Keep team bios to a photo and a couple of sentences, but make sure they mention project types and roles, not just design philosophy.
5. How do I get in touch?
Word of mouth is the foundation of business development in landscape architecture. But even a warm referral from an architect or a returning client leads to the same place: your website. The referred prospect’s first move is almost always to check the site before picking up the phone. If they can’t figure out how to contact you quickly, the referral loses its momentum. By the time someone is looking for the contact page, the hard work is done. They’ve decided you’re worth talking to. This is where I found the worst mistakes.
At one firm, the only contact option was an email link in the footer. At another, the contact form was broken entirely. A third of the firms in the review made it harder than it should be to start a conversation.
The fix
A visible contact button in the navigation on every page and a form that works. Tell people what to include: their site, what they’re planning, and roughly where they are in the process. Then tell them what happens next: “We’ll follow up with a few questions and, if it’s a good fit, suggest a time to walk the site together.”
The gap
Landscape architecture has a harder version of this problem than most design professions. The work photographs beautifully but communicates poorly. Scale is invisible, contributions are shared, and the most valuable outcomes can’t be captured in an image. Every firm in this review was doing good work. Their websites just hadn’t caught up yet. The firms that close this gap first will be the ones prospective clients remember when it’s time to pick up the phone.