The brief

MBSoy is a Helsinki-based architectural studio working across residential, commercial, and adaptive-reuse projects in Finland and the broader Nordic region. The studio is well-known among Finnish architects but had limited international visibility — which mattered, because much of the work it wanted to attract (international clients commissioning Nordic-style residential) lives outside Finland.

The existing site was a Squarespace template with low-resolution images, no project taxonomy, and a "press" section that hadn't been updated in years. Architecture journalists who were sent links to specific projects often gave up trying to find them.

What we did

Project-led navigation

Architecture portfolios are looked at the way magazines are read — by project, not by service. We rebuilt the site around projects as the primary entity. Each project has its own dedicated page with hero, plans, location, materials, photography, and the studio's written notes. Cross-linking by typology (residential, commercial, public, adaptive-reuse), material (timber, concrete, stone), and location.

High-resolution image pipeline

Architectural photography needs to be displayed at print quality. We built a delivery pipeline that serves Cloudflare-optimized images per device — 4K on high-DPI desktops, AVIF on mobile — without bloating page weight. Each image carries proper credit and metadata for press use.

Multilingual content

Finnish as the primary, with English and Russian. Project pages share the same images and plans across languages but with locale-appropriate text — Russian-language clients in the studio's network drove the third locale.

Press section that journalists use

Dedicated press kit URLs per project with high-resolution photography, project facts, and pre-written boilerplate paragraphs. One-click download for the full press kit. Real contact information for the principal, not a generic info@ inbox.

Schema markup for architectural projects

CreativeWork schema for projects, Person schema for the studio's principals, Organization schema for the firm. Where projects had received awards, those carried Award schema.

What we learned

Architectural sites lose business in image-loading time. Architects looking at a portfolio scroll through 8–15 projects in under three minutes; if every project takes four seconds to load, half are never seen. The single highest-ROI engineering decision was the image pipeline, not the visual design.

The other lesson: dedicated press kits drove almost all subsequent press. Journalists land on a project, find a press kit URL in the project page, and the next thing we see is a publication mention. Without that page, the press feature doesn't happen.

Related

For similar portfolio-led sites: /development-of-corporate-websites. For the multilingual SEO work: /seo-promotion.

Project lead: Marketing MIX. Client: MBSoy. Year: 2023–2024.