Your projects are photographs. Five of these nine templates have nowhere to put one

The short answer

An architecture practice is bought on its work, and the work exists as photographs, plans and sections. So the first question about any template is not how it looks. It is how many places it has to put an image, and whether those places are a system you can add the eleventh project to or a composition that breaks when you add the seventh.

Asked that way, the two templates in this catalogue filed under Architecture — Living Facade and Quarry — answer badly. Neither has a single image slot. They are scenes drawn by the browser, generated geometry about form and movement, and they are genuinely good at being that. They are not project sites, and a category label is a poor guide here.

This is a guide to our own inventory, including the parts of it that will not suit you. If you need a project grid, the templates that have one are filed under Interior Design and Real Estate, not Architecture. For the wider question of judging a template by your own work rather than by its demo, start with choosing a template for a portfolio site.

What nine built-environment templates actually contain

Nine of the sixty-two templates here sit in the built environment: two under Architecture, one under Construction, two under Interior Design and four under Real Estate. We read the source of all nine and counted the places an image can go — the two ways a page normally carries a photograph are an <img> element and a CSS background-image declaration — along with the structural sections and whether an enquiry form exists in the file.

The table splits along one line, and it is not the category line. The five scroll-driven templates carry no image elements at all — fifty-three between the four conventional ones, none between the five interactive ones. Bedrock is the near miss: it has no image element either, but it does carry a single video inline, which is why the file runs to three and a half megabytes.

Why a generated scene has no room for a photograph

This is not an oversight in those five. It follows from how they are built. Living Facade draws its whole facade to a canvas from code: thirty kilobytes of document, no external request, nothing fetched at runtime. Quarry and the commercial tower project real geometry per frame through WebGL. In all of them the thing on screen is computed, and there is no layer in the composition where a photograph would sit without contradicting the thing around it.

You can, of course, add a section underneath. Quarry, the tower and Boulevard all already have six sections and an enquiry form, so they are not single-scene statement pieces — there is a page below the scene to extend. But you would be building the project system yourself, from nothing, and the result is a conventional gallery bolted to a rendered scene. Sometimes that is exactly right. It is worth knowing it is the job in front of you rather than discovering it after handover.

Living Facade and Bedrock are different again: four full-screen scenes with one headline each, and a single video section respectively. Neither has an enquiry form. Treat those two as front doors in front of a site, not as the site. If the scene is what you want, the thing to check first is what a visitor sees when it fails to start — we counted that across all eighteen WebGL templates.

The four that already carry a body of work

Verdant, Larkfield, Latitude and Canopy each ship a working project system: a set of named entries with their own photograph, heading and copy, laid out as a grid you extend by adding another entry. All four have an enquiry form and five to seven sections, and their photography is inline in the document rather than fetched, so there is no asset pipeline to replace.

• Verdant — Biophilic Interior Studio: nineteen image elements, and the most editorial of the four. Its structure is a long argument broken into principles, which maps well onto a practice that wants to explain a method rather than list buildings.

• Larkfield — Residential Estate Agency: thirteen images across six named properties, a neighbourhood section and a valuation form. The closest thing here to a filterable project index.

• Latitude — Commercial Property Marketplace: fourteen images, six sections, and the driest of the four, which suits commercial and institutional work.

• Canopy — Office Plantscaping: seven images across five named projects with locations. The smallest project system, and the easiest to fill if you have five schemes rather than twenty.

None of these is an architecture template, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What they are is the right skeleton wearing the wrong words. Rebranding one is real work but it is bounded work: colours, type and photography live in predictable places, which is the subject of a separate guide. What a template will not do for you either way is set out in what a website template does not include.

Read those four as structures rather than as finished sites for their stated sector. The images in them are placeholders for a business that is not yours, and every one of them will be replaced.

Four questions worth answering before you choose

• How many projects will the site carry in two years? Under six, a composed page can hold them. Above about ten, you need a grid that repeats, and you should be choosing from the four above.

• Do you need drawings as well as photographs? A plan or a section is a wide, high-contrast image with fine linework, and it needs a slot that can show it large. Count whether the template has one, or only square thumbnails.

• Who updates it? If nobody on the team writes code, a template whose gallery is a repeated block of markup is manageable and one whose imagery is computed is not.

• Is the motion doing work for you, or for us? A rendered facade is a strong opening for a practice whose argument is about form and light. It is dead weight for a practice whose argument is twelve finished buildings.

The honest summary is that this catalogue currently serves the second kind of practice through its conventional templates and the first kind through its Architecture ones, and the labels point the wrong way for anyone who reads them quickly. We would rather say that here than sell you a scene with nowhere to put your work. Browse the whole catalogue and count the image slots yourself; every detail page links straight to a demo you can open.

What this does not tell you

These are source counts. An image element is a place an image can go, not evidence that the slot is well designed, sized correctly or legible on a phone — and a template with nineteen of them is not therefore better than one with seven. Open the live demos and judge the layouts; the counts only tell you which templates have the argument at all.

We also have no data on how architecture practices actually convert visitors, here or anywhere. There is no analytics on any launched site we can legitimately cite, so nothing above claims that one structure wins enquiries and another loses them. It is an argument about what your material needs, not a measured result.