Corporate website with a portfolio catalog for an architectural and construction company
A prospective client can size up the company's level in 3–5 minutes, browse relevant projects, and submit a request for an estimate — while the team can update projects and pages without developers.
About the Project
A website built to sell custom architectural design and bespoke construction. The point isn't a visitor admiring pretty pages — it's finding the right service direction fast, seeing matching completed projects, understanding the working model from the start, and sending an inquiry. The core of the site is a portfolio catalog with project filtering and an intuitive page structure. Visitors easily find the property characteristics, the initial requirements, the proposed solutions, the final result, and a detailed visual presentation of every project.
About Customer
Renato is the operations manager of an Italian company specializing in bespoke architectural design and client-specific construction. Their typical sale is long, high-ticket, and heavily trust-dependent. A prospective client almost always wants to see completed projects and judge the level of execution before any conversation about budget. The client had no internal technical team, so the website had to be something the content team could maintain and grow on its own.
Portfolio as a selection catalog
Photos matter, but they don't sell on their own. Visitors had to be able to find similar projects fast — by type, scale, or style.
Frequent updates without breaking pages
The client's team wanted to add projects and edit services on their own. That asked for a disciplined CMS — right fields, right blocks, right checks.
Mobile-first portfolio browsing
Portfolio browsing had to feel right on a phone. Otherwise, the visitor closes the tab and moves on to another contractor.
Two visitor types
Part of the audience comes to look at the work; another part wants to size up the services and understand the ordering process. Both needs had to be served inside one structure — portfolio not hiding the services, services not distracting from the cases.
Raw project materials
Construction companies typically have photos and scattered notes from a project, not a ready-made case study. We had to help structure projects so they would read consistently and look properly presented.
Proposed Solution
We built the website around a service → relevant projects → inquiry logic, with the portfolio carrying the weight of "proof of competence" at every step. Next.js handles speed and rendering stability; Directus runs the structured entities and safe content editing. AI shows up only as a practical assistant for packaging cases and policing content quality — so the team can keep the bar high on its own.
Managed project catalog
We modeled projects as structured records with a defined field set — project type, location or context, scale, services delivered, key decisions, materials and approach, gallery, results, CTA. On the frontend, that becomes a filterable catalog with detailed pages that read as full case studies.
Next.js site as a system of reusable blocks
Service pages, project pages, and the base informational sections were built as reusable components, so new pages can be added as content without putting the layout at risk.
Directus as a back office with rules and roles
Inside Directus, we configured collections for projects, services, pages, dictionaries, media, and SEO fields. Access roles and editing restrictions keep the content team fast without letting them step on the structure.
AI layer for content quality
AI works as an assistant in two places. When a new project is added, it proposes a concise description without fluff, drafts the 3–5 key decisions from raw notes, and helps unify the tone. Before publication, it surfaces gaps — missing scale, missing location, missing outcome — and proposes tags and categories to keep the catalog normalized.
Conversion flows for estimate requests
Lead-capture sits where decisions actually happen — after viewing a project, on a specific service page, in the catalog right after filtering. The form collects the minimum viable data so the manager has enough context to start the conversation.
We started by breaking down how clients in this segment actually make decisions. We wrote down the questions people ask before they make contact — about completed work, turnkey delivery, the mechanics of the process, the factors that shape pricing. From that, we decided which pages were needed for the first release and how each one had to guide a visitor toward the inquiry.
+1 Resource
Results
The site helped the client close their first customer in the first week after going live.
2–3 minutes
from high-intent traffic to inquiry
20 minutes
to publish a new project without developers
−77% back-and-forth
clarification emails about a project
2 seconds
to load the first portfolio screen on mobile
Zero developer tasks
for typical content edits
20 pages per month
of growth pace, with no technical debt
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