How to make a designer website that attracts the right clients

TL;DR: How to make a designer website

This guide shows you how to build a designer website using your own name as the domain. You'll start from a portfolio or studio template and add the five pages commissioning clients look for: your work, your services, an about page, your process and your contact details. The services step matters most. List each discipline separately, such as brand identity, packaging, web and product design, illustration and art direction, with a starting price beside each one. That way, clients can see straight away whether you're the right fit. Yola's website builder includes ready-made Services and Pricing blocks for this layout, so you can update a rate yourself whenever it changes.

The second half covers case studies that explain the brief and what you delivered, and an enquiry form that asks for the project, timing and budget before you reply. Since design has no formal licence, it also shows you how to build credibility with client logos, awards and testimonials. You'll add a page for talks, workshops and your current availability, and learn how to appear in local searches like "[discipline] designer [city]" as well as searches for your own name. Work through all ten steps, and the enquiries that reach you will be the ones worth quoting.

What to include

Top features of a designer website

How to make a designer
website in 10 steps

Your domain is what somebody types after hearing your name in a meeting. Design work arrives by recommendation more often than by search, so the address people land on should be your own name where you work under it, or the studio name where you have one. Take the .com if it is free, because that is still the ending people assume when they are typing from memory.

Skip hyphens and numbers. Someone repeating your address out loud drops both and ends up on a different designer's site. If your name has gone, add your discipline rather than a hyphen, so janeharperdesign.com rather than jane-harper.com, then use that same spelling on your email signature, your invoices and the profiles you keep on Behance and Dribbble.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year. If you already own an address from an old portfolio, point it at the new site instead of starting a second one, because whatever is printed on three years of business cards is worth keeping alive.

You know what a well-built page looks like, which is exactly why a builder can feel like a step down, so be straight with yourself about the trade. A template will not hand you a one-off site with custom motion and a type system nobody else has. If that is the brief you are writing for yourself, you are commissioning a build and paying for it. What Yola gives you instead is structure you can edit in a browser, so the site is live this month and adding a new case study takes twenty minutes rather than an email to whoever made it.

Answer a few questions about the work you take and Yola's AI Website Builder puts together a first draft to start from. The full AI tools sit on the paid plans and the free plan has basic AI, so treat what comes back as a wireframe with your name on it and replace the type, the colors and every line of copy. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site. Start from a template that already carries a case study grid and a services layout, and most of your work is deciding which projects go in.

Start from a template

Designer website templates

Six pages do the job, and keeping the set that small is a decision rather than a shortcut. Every extra page is one more thing that quietly stops being true while you are heads down on client work.

Two of the six carry most of the weight. Work is where somebody decides whether you can solve their kind of problem, and Services is where they find out whether you take that kind of problem at all. The other four hold those two up.

Build these six first, then add anything else once the essentials are live:

Name the disciplines the way designers name them, and the way a client with a budget searches for them. Brand identity, packaging, web and product design, illustration, art direction. "Creative solutions" is not a discipline, and nobody holding a packaging brief will read it as one.

Then be straight about the edges. Saying which disciplines you take is half the filter. Saying which ones you have stopped taking is the half that saves you the most time, so where you no longer do pitch work, or motion, or anything you would rather not go near again, one plain line on the services page turns it away before it becomes a call. The same goes for handover. Whether a web project ends at design files or you build the site too is the most misunderstood line in a designer's scope, and it belongs here in one sentence.

Give people a number to work from. A starting figure against each discipline filters harder than anything else on the site, and you can write it honestly: identity from a figure, illustration priced on usage and licence, retainers sold as a number of days a month with notice to stop. Where the work is genuinely custom, say what you need before you can quote, which is usually the deliverables, the deadline, who signs off and whether there is an existing brand to work inside.

Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks lay this out with a discipline, a short description and a figure sitting together, and you edit the number yourself the day your rate moves. Where one discipline brings in most of your work, give it a page of its own rather than a line in a grid, because "packaging design" and "brand identity" get searched for separately.

This step decides which enquiries you get, so give it a proper afternoon. A case study carries more than a picture of the finished thing: say what the brief was, which constraint made the job hard, what you made, and what happened once it shipped. Four short paragraphs with the work underneath is the whole format.

Show the work rather than the road to it. Mood boards, rejected routes and a wall of sketches are interesting to other designers and mean very little to a founder with a launch in March. Where process earns its place, it is a single image that explains a decision, such as why the mark had to survive being embroidered at 15mm.

Photograph the physical work properly. Packaging and print want real production samples, shot straight on in even light, with a hand or a familiar object in one frame so the size reads. Screen work looks honest as a full-width screenshot, and a device mockup is fine, though three of them at angles hides the design you are trying to show. For a redesign, put the old identity and the new one side by side as two photos in a gallery, with a line underneath saying what changed and why.

Say what you actually did on each project and credit the people who did the rest. If you art directed an illustrator, say so. If the build was somebody else's, name them. Name the image files for the work, so harbourline-packaging-shelf.jpg rather than IMG_2093.jpg, and put the same description in the alt text. Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds a project set as it comes, and on a paid plan you can build a custom gallery with the Custom code block when a project needs a layout of its own.

Yola has no native booking, and for design work that is the right shape anyway. Nobody drops a project into your calendar without a conversation first. What the form does is make the opening message a useful one.

Three fields do the filtering: what the project is, roughly when it needs to land, and roughly what budget it has. Ask for budget as a set of ranges rather than an open box, because a founder will happily pick a range and will not type a number. Add a name, an email and one box for the brief, then stop. A form asking eleven questions gets abandoned by the client you wanted.

You choose exactly which fields appear, because Yola's contact form is customizable rather than fixed, and the Forms block help article walks through setting it up. A submission is an enquiry and not a commission, so word the form and the automatic confirmation Yola sends to match: you read the brief, then come back with a scope and a figure. Then actually come back the next working day, because a founder who needs a designer next month is talking to two of you.

There is no licence to practise design, so nothing on this page is a certificate. What you can show is a record: how long you have been working, who you have worked for, where the work has been recognised, and how you run a project once it starts.

Word each one as an offer rather than a rule, and only put up what you hold. Where a client is under NDA, give the sector and the size of the company instead of the brand. Where you belong to a professional body, name it and keep the membership current. Put the two strongest signals on the home page next to the work, rather than on an About page nobody scrolls to.

A fair amount of what keeps a designer visible happens away from client work. A conference talk, a workshop, portfolio reviews at a local meetup, a studio open day, a stall at a design market. One page holds all of it, and it is also the right place to say when you are next free to take a project.

Each entry needs the date, the city or the link, what it is, what it costs if anything, and how to reserve a place, which points at your enquiry form. Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page you edit by hand. That takes a couple of minutes, and it is worth doing the same afternoon a date gets confirmed.

Keep past dates on the page below the upcoming ones, since a list of talks you have actually given is a credential in its own right. Put your current availability at the top and change it the day it changes, because a stale "booking from September" does more damage than no line at all.

A designer gets found both ways. Some clients want somebody they can sit down with, and plenty do not care which city you are in, and both searches are worth having. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side of your pages, and the rest is your own wording plus a profile you keep on Google.

The specialism searches matter as much as the city ones. "Brand designer for [industry]" gets typed by a founder who has already worked out what they need, and a page written for that industry beats a home page saying you work with everyone. Your own name matters most of all, because you get recommended by name and the person searching has nothing else to go on.

Before you send the link to anybody, go through the site on a phone the way a client would. Send yourself an enquiry and check the automatic confirmation arrives and reads the way you want it to. Tap your email address. Open every case study and watch how long the images take, because a portfolio that stalls on hotel wifi is a portfolio nobody scrolls to the end of.

Export images at a sensible size before you upload them. A hero straight out of the camera at full resolution is the most common speed problem on a designer's site, and that fix is yours rather than the builder's. Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts between phone, tablet and laptop on its own, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups.

After launch the upkeep is small and specific. Add the last project while you still remember what the brief was, change the availability line when your calendar changes, take down a discipline you have stopped offering, and add a client to the list the week you are finally allowed to name them. Put two dates in the year to do it in one sitting. A site that stays current holds its search ranking better than one left alone, and it saves you rebuilding the whole thing every three years.

Common designer website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of problems turn up on designer sites, and each one either loses you a project or brings in one you never wanted.

How much does a designer website cost?

Building it yourself on Yola costs nothing to start: free plan, then $9.95/mo when you want your own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year, and hosting, SSL and backups come with the site rather than as separate bills.

Paying somebody to build it runs higher, usually a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars for a site this size, and more where you want a bespoke front end with custom motion in it. Designing it yourself and paying a developer only for the build is the route plenty of designers take, though it does put every future edit through somebody else's schedule.

Your own time is the real line in this budget. Writing four case studies properly takes longer than building the pages, and it is the part nobody can do for you. What you get out of building it yourself is what happens after launch: adding a project, changing a rate or updating your availability is an edit you make in the browser, on the day, without booking anyone.