The honest answer is not one convenient number. An interior studio website can begin in the low thousands and move well into five figures because the visible pages are only one part of the work. The useful question is what the investment must include for the website to represent the studio properly and support the next stage of its business.
START WITH THE JOB
A compact portfolio for an emerging practice is a different commission from repositioning an established studio with dozens of projects, international enquiries and an internal marketing team. Define the business job first: clearer positioning, better-qualified enquiries, a stronger project archive, easier publishing or a complete change in perception. Scope and cost should follow that job—not an arbitrary page count.
LOW THOUSANDS
At the leanest end, expect a focused structure, a restrained visual system and a small number of carefully assembled pages. This can work when positioning is already clear, project material is ready and the studio accepts a limited content system. It becomes false economy when photography, copy, hierarchy or technical decisions are unresolved and simply pushed back onto the client.
MID TO HIGH FOUR FIGURES
A more bespoke studio site commonly needs discovery, content architecture, responsive art direction, several project templates, considered motion, development, analytics and search foundations. The value is not extra decoration. It is the time required to translate a physical design practice into a coherent digital system and test that system with real work before launch.
FIVE FIGURES AND BEYOND
Investment rises when the brief includes a large project migration, multilingual content, complex filtering, journal publishing, third-party integrations, advanced animation, custom 3D, photography direction or extensive stakeholder review. These are not automatically better websites. They are larger operational and technical systems, and they should be commissioned only when the studio genuinely needs them.
WHAT CHANGES THE QUOTE
The strongest cost drivers are usually content readiness, number and variation of project stories, migration volume, CMS complexity, motion ambition, integrations, accessibility requirements and the number of decision-makers. A clear brief can reduce uncertainty. An apparently simple brief with missing content and open-ended approvals can increase it.
BUDGET FOR CONTENT
Photography, image permissions, copy editing and project information deserve their own line in the plan. A beautifully designed framework cannot compensate for weak crops, inconsistent credits or missing explanations of the studio’s contribution. Resolve who supplies, selects, edits and approves each asset before treating the development estimate as the complete project cost.
COMPARE THE SAME THING
When reviewing proposals, ask whether each includes strategy, copy support, responsive design, development, CMS configuration, migration, analytics, technical SEO, accessibility checks, browser testing, training and post-launch care. A lower total may simply exclude work that appears later as a delay, compromise or change request. The clearest proposal makes assumptions and exclusions visible.
A BETTER FIRST QUESTION
Instead of asking for a price before the problem is understood, share the current website, the work you want to attract, the project material available, the desired timing and an indicative investment range. A useful first conversation can then identify the right level of ambition—and whether a focused improvement, a full redesign or no rebuild at all is the responsible recommendation.