A fast-turnaround website rebuild for a Bali-based architecture studio targeting expatriates and investors in the luxury villa market — where I owned every stage of the process: project management, research, design, frontend and backend development, QA, and client negotiation.
52%
Visitor Growth
3x
Lead Conversion
38%
Engagement
The Problem
Lumbung Architect's existing web presence didn't match the caliber of clients it was trying to attract. The studio's target market — expatriates living in Bali and high-net-worth individuals investing in villas across Bali and Labuan Bajo — expect the same level of polish online that they'd expect from the studios they were being compared against (Gfab, Andra Matin, Arkana Architect). Without a website that reflected that standard, the studio risked being filtered out before a prospective client ever picked up the phone. On top of that, the studio had no structured way to capture and follow up on interested visitors — every visit that didn't convert into a direct message or call was a lead lost.
The Objective
Design and build a website that:
The Brief
For this project, the client brief was to revamp an architecture studio website with the target market being those who live a luxurious lifestyle, such as expatriates in Bali and successful businesspeople looking to invest in villas in Bali or Labuan Bajo. The client requested a simple and elegant design, with a white color scheme, and provided UI inspiration from other architecture studio websites, including Gfab, Andra Matin, and Arkana Architect.
In addition to showcasing their work, the client wanted the website to serve as a lead generator and directly impact revenue. To facilitate this, they requested forms for visitors to provide their name, email, and phone number, allowing the studio to follow up and increase the number of prospective customers.
Overall, the goal of this project was to create a professional and visually appealing website that effectively targets the desired audience and drives business growth.
Project Management
I ran this project end-to-end — planning, building, testing, and speaking with the client directly — but design was the one phase I didn't carry entirely solo: I brought in two designers to split desktop and mobile design work, so both could progress in parallel instead of one person working through every breakpoint sequentially. Final polish and design sign-off, however, stayed with me — every screen passed through me before it moved to development, so the visual language stayed consistent regardless of who drafted it first. Project management here meant keeping this small, temporary team's output in sync with the rest of the roles I was carrying alone.
I broke the project into five sequential phases, mapped against a week-by-week Gantt chart shared with the client for visibility:
The whole engagement ran across roughly one quarter (January–March). Outside of the Design Process phase — where I had two designers working desktop and mobile in parallel under my direction and final review — every other phase was mine alone to execute, so sequencing across those had to be exact: there was no slack to run PM, development, and QA in parallel the way the two designers could split their workload.
A key PM decision going in: given the compressed timeline and single-person execution, research had to be just enough — not exhaustive — while still being anchored to something concrete the client had already validated (their own brief and reference sites), rather than open-ended discovery. That decision shaped everything downstream, from the research approach to the design system used.
Research
Given the scope and timeline, deep generative research (interviews, surveys, competitive audits) wasn't the right investment for this project — the client had already narrowed the direction through their brief and their three reference studios. So instead of research-heavy discovery, I translated the brief directly into user stories and acceptance criteria, scenario by scenario, for each core page: Home, Portfolio, About, and Contact.
For example, rather than asking "what do visitors want from a homepage," I worked backward from the brief's two stated goals — showcase work and generate leads — and wrote it as a flow:
Open Website → See Home Page → "I want to quickly and easily see some best portfolios from finished/ongoing projects" → Show latest portfolios (max 6), with title, status, project type, year, land/building area, client, and photos — clickable through to a detail page.
Each scenario followed this same shape: a user goal stated in first person, paired with concrete, testable acceptance criteria (exact field lists, max item counts, required states). This turned a fairly light research phase into something still rigorous enough to build against — every screen in the wireframes traces back to a specific line in this user story document, which doubled as my de facto product requirements doc.
This was lightweight-but-structured research: fast enough to fit a compressed timeline, but still deliberate enough to prevent scope drift once design and development started.
Strategy
With the brief and user stories in hand, the strategy came down to two intertwined tracks:
Visual strategy — match the client's stated aesthetic (simple, elegant, white color scheme) while staying differentiated enough from the three reference studios rather than imitating them directly. The visual direction leaned on generous white space, large architectural photography as the hero element, and restrained typography — letting the studio's portfolio photos do the talking rather than heavy UI ornamentation.
Conversion strategy — every page needed a deliberate path back to contact. Rather than isolating lead capture to a single Contact page, the strategy was to surface inquiry points contextually: an "Inquiry" action directly on portfolio detail pages (so a visitor who falls in love with a specific villa design can act on that impulse immediately), plus a persistent contact form on the homepage for visitors who are ready before they've browsed the full portfolio.
Information architecture followed directly from the brief's two goals:
Design Process
Before touching any digital wireframing tool, structure started on paper. A quick hand-drawn pass let me stress-test the site's core layout — Homepage, project listing, and project detail — without getting precious about it; sketches are cheap to throw away, which made it the right place to work out rough placement and flow before committing time to anything pixel-precise.
Low Fidelity
The low-fidelity wireframes translated the user stories into layout decisions before any visual styling was applied, so structure could be validated independently of aesthetics.
Key structural decisions made at this stage:
Wireframe review with the client at this stage caught structural issues early — before a single line of visual design or code was committed — which paid off directly in a lighter QA/bug-fixing load later.
Final Design
The high-fidelity design carried the lofi structure through into the client's requested aesthetic: a white-dominant palette, full-bleed architectural photography, and clean sans-serif typography that stays out of the way of the imagery.
A few decisions worth calling out:
Post-Launch
Post-launch, I ran an active, public bug and change-request tracker rather than handling fixes ad hoc over chat — this gave the client visibility into what was being worked on and gave me a paper trail for prioritization.
Across the tracked list:
This phase also functioned as a second, lighter-touch round of client collaboration — several "bugs" were really the client refining their own preferences once they saw the site live (quote text, spacing, image sizing), which is a normal and expected part of shipping fast with a single point of contact instead of a full internal review cycle.
Impact
New visitor traffic grew by more than 52% following launch — expanding the studio's reach well beyond its existing referral network and putting the site in front of the exact audience the brief was aimed at.
Visitors converting from casual browsing into qualified inquiries increased 3x, validating the decision to place contextual "Inquiry" CTAs directly on portfolio pages instead of relying on a single Contact page.
Average time spent on the site rose by 38%, a signal that visitors were exploring the portfolio in depth rather than skimming the homepage and leaving.
Personal Takeaways
Bringing in two designers for desktop and mobile was the right call for speed, but it only worked because every screen still routed back through me before moving to development — otherwise "parallel" design work risks turning into two slightly different products. The real project management skill here wasn't motivating the designers, it was refusing to let phases overlap just because I could technically start coding before design review was signed off. The Gantt chart wasn't a formality; it was the only thing stopping five roles — three of them mine alone — from stepping on each other.
This project proved that "not enough time for deep research" doesn't have to mean "no research." Turning the client brief directly into user stories with explicit acceptance criteria gave me something almost as rigorous as a proper discovery phase, just compressed — and it meant every wireframe decision could be traced back to a specific, agreed-upon requirement instead of my own taste.
Tracking bugs in a shared, visible sheet rather than private notes turned post-launch fixing into something the client could see progress on in real time. It changed the dynamic from "trust me, I'm fixing it" to "here's exactly what's fixed and what's next" — which matters a lot when you're the sole point of contact and the client has no one else to check your word against.
Being the one who both talks to the client and has to build what gets agreed to made me far more conservative about scope creep — every "quick addition" the client asked for (like the Blog page) was something I had to personally weigh against the timeline I'd already committed to, rather than passing that tension to a separate PM.
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