A boutique interior design studio fixed a portfolio that broke on phones

Representative examplesEvery case study in this library is an illustrative composite of the kind of engagement we deliver — written to show our method and standards, not to name clients.

Where they started

A two-principal interior design studio takes on a handful of residential and hospitality projects a year, and new business arrives through the portfolio — homeowners and developers browse the work, then write. The site was built years earlier by a freelancer, around galleries of large commissioned photography. The photography is still excellent; the machinery under it predates the phone-first decade. The owner treats the site as her shop window and edits it personally between project deliveries.

What it was costing

The studio's portfolio carried its new-business pipeline, but galleries built years earlier collapsed on phones — images cropped badly, captions overlapped, and the studio's analytics showed most visitors abandoning within the first gallery.

What they could see

• Galleries collapsed on phones — images cropped badly, captions overlapped — and analytics showed most mobile visitors leaving inside the first gallery.
• Uploading a finished project meant manually resizing every photograph, hours the studio never had during install week.
• The owner had stopped adding older completed projects because the process felt like wrestling the site.
• New inquiries went unanswered at the gallery — visitors couldn't reach the contact page on the device they were holding.

The constraints we worked inside

• The studio's visual identity was non-negotiable; the rebuild had to render their existing art direction faithfully.
• Project photography arrives as huge files; the solution had to handle them without a manual resizing ritual.
• The owner edits the site personally and had one hour to learn the new setup.

What had been tried before

A freelancer patched the gallery CSS so the worst crops stopped overlapping captions.

The fixes were per-image hacks; every new upload re-broke them, and the gallery markup underneath still had no responsive structure.

The studio adopted a manual ritual: resize every photograph in a desktop app before uploading.

The ritual survived two weeks. Under install-week deadlines photos went up unprocessed, and the oversized files were exactly what broke the galleries.

What we proposed

We proposed rebuilding the portfolio as CMS-driven galleries on Wix Studio: each project becomes a structured record, and the template that renders it is responsive by construction rather than by per-image fixes. The media pipeline gets rules — uploads become fast variants automatically — so the studio's huge photographs stop being a manual problem. The owner's editing path gets designed down to a three-action flow and rehearsed inside the one hour she has. The visual identity would be rebuilt faithfully, not refreshed; the art direction was never the problem.

Just as important is what we ruled out, and why:

• A custom-coded portfolio with a lightweight CMS — The owner edits personally with one hour to learn; a codebase makes every future tweak an outside dependency.
• Staying on the current builder with patched CSS — Per-image fixes were the documented failure mode; responsiveness that isn't structural re-breaks with the first new upload.
• A desktop resizing workflow with new upload rules — Manual rituals were already proven to collapse under deadline; the pipeline had to work without anyone remembering steps.

How the work ran

Delivered by the experience pod — designer + frontend engineer over 4 weeks, with working increments reviewed with the client every week.

The stack, and the reasoning

Wix Studio

Section-level responsive controls replace per-image patching, and the visual editor is learnable inside the owner's one-hour budget — a coded portfolio would have outsourced every edit.

Wix CMS

Projects become records with fields; the gallery is data plus a template, so adding work means filling a form rather than rearranging a layout.

Native responsive imaging

A twenty-megabyte photograph becomes fast variants on upload — the manual resizing ritual was the failure point, so it had to stop existing.

GA4

The studio already had it; gallery-to-contact events on the new template let the owner verify the pipeline with a report she recognizes.

What went wrong

How we worked together

Cadence

One weekly call plus a shared document of open questions — a four-week engagement with a two-person studio can't absorb more meetings than that.

Client side

The owner made every call herself, with her studio manager supplying project photography and captions from the current job files.

Decisions

Art-direction decisions she made live on the staging site during our call; anything she slept on went into the shared doc with a deadline.

They provided

Raw photography from five years of projects, captions and credits, her existing analytics login, and one uninterrupted hour at the end for editing rehearsal.

What changed

The headline: mobile lcp on gallery pages, field data over the 28 days after launch — 3.9s → 1.8s, read from Page-speed field data (CrUX). A second check: gallery-to-contact-page progression at +34%.

The owner edits without bracing herself. Adding a finished project is an evening task at the dining table, not a request to an outside person, and new photography goes up the week it arrives. The studio stopped turning down press or directory features because the portfolio couldn't show that side of the work. Analytics now get looked at monthly over coffee — the numbers became something the studio reads rather than something that worried them.

The result was read from Page-speed field data (CrUX) against the pre-engagement baseline over the stated window, with a guardrail check on gallery-to-contact-page progression. Where platform-reported numbers and business outcomes differ, this record says which layer it is quoting.

What they own now

• The Wix Studio site with gallery templates the owner edits in three actions.
• A one-hour recorded walkthrough covering her entire publishing loop.
• Photography intake rules written as a checklist she can hand to any photographer.
• GA4 events for gallery-to-contact progression, with the monthly report she already reads.
• The legacy image library converted and archived, originals preserved in her storage.