[TSAW] The State of Architect Websites: 18 Cannock Architect Firms (2026) Audit & Findings

If you’re new to these posts, TSAW is a developing series in which I write candidly and conversationally about The State of Architect Websites in a given locality, analysing design trends and shortfalls with a specific focus on Architects because their websites are often not clearly understood, and forced into one size that doesn’t fit. True North Web Design is on a mission to fix that.

Methodology:

Results are from a Google search for “Cannock Architects”, from only the first page of results or the Google Business page.

• Duplicates are removed.
• No category can be won by the same firm twice, to prevent monopolies and encourage surfacing smaller businesses where it’s not uncommon to see them do some things very well, but not everything, lacking the design budget of their larger counterparts.

Testing Environment:

• Desktop: Ungoogled Chromium (Linux, Fedora 44)
• Mobile: Google Chrome (Android)

Ordinarily I use Firefox but tweaks and plugins made for privacy gains can break websites – particularly ones with privacy-hostile architecture. In order to see what the average user sees on your websites, I run my audits from a different, unmodified browser.

Honesty & Transparency:
Where a website has been selected as a winner in a category, it has been independently chosen by me based on the reasoning I outline below. No firm can pay or sponsor me in order to appear here, nor will this ever be a possibility. Firms are also not asked before-the-fact as a matter of course, to prevent any influence. I do contact them after publication to let them know they have been featured.

Individual firms are named when receiving positive recognition. Negative findings are discussed anonymously. The intent is always to discuss industry findings, not degrade small businesses trying their best to get on in the world. Larger datasets are anonymised de-facto.

Statistics:
Where percentages are given, they are rounded to the nearest whole number for easier legibility.

Complications and Omissions:

Company Dissolved

• 1 website under construction with a notice from around 2014, but companies house reveals the company liquidated. This website is disqualified.

Broken Links

• 1 website returns a critical error from the Google Profiile listing but does work when clicking the normal search results link. This company was contacted during the audit, to let them know of this issue, with advice on how to fix it. No response was received by the time the audit was published.
• This company will be included in the audit, because no return contact was made.

Greek Sites & Wix

• 1 business had only a link to a Wix site with no actual website on it, and other searches for their name revealed a company operating in the London area, and another based in Athens. Neither of these are likely to be the same company, though the Greek site does look like it uses Wix too. It’s unclear what’s happened here since the original website can’t be identified and so this is disqualified from the audit.

Welsh Architects:

• 1 site that appears in Cannock results is the contact page of a Welsh architect company. Without doing some digging I don’t know why this appeared in Cannock search results because it wasn’t even a Cannock location page (or anywhere near Cannock, like Lichfield, etc).
• I haven’t set a standard for this sort of anomaly in how I do my audits because I never foresaw it coming. For transparency, on this occasion I’ve NOT included them in the audit because I couldn’t see any relevance for Cannock in doing so.

With duplicates, insolvencies, broken links and other anomalies accounted for, this audit continues with 18 working websites.

First Impressions:

Cannock is a much smaller area than Birmingham, and so the first finding is that of these results, very few are actually Cannock Architects. More commonly, they are firms based elsewhere who also offer services into the Cannock area.

This is not true of all of them, though. In the main, first impressions suggest that the design and structure of Cannock Architect websites is, in standard, noticeably lower than Birmingham – but this should not be a surprise given the concentration of wealth and degree of competition that differs between the two locations.

It’s also more interesting to note why the standards are lower (not just that they are), and in the spirit of using it as a chance to improve, I will also give some of my usual advice as I go.

Findings on Privacy:

• 6 sites had a cookie popup that probably isn’t necessary. 0 took control off the user, but 4 failed to provide visitors with an instant DENY option.
• 2 sites use Google Recaptcha v.3, spam-filter for comments and forms that is also by default not privacy-friendly or GDPR compliant.
• That’s a total of 8 (44%) websites with privacy-unfriendly practices.

Failure to provide an immediate deny option with the same ease and visual weight as “accept” falls below the standard required by GDPR (Article 7 & Article 4(11)) and is what I would deem to be privacy-hostile as a practise.

There are also less privacy-invasive ways of mitigating spam on your website such as Honeypots, negating the need to use Recaptcha v.3 which is also not a privacy-respecting tool.

Many sites probably use Google Analytics, but this is also unnecessary and privacy-hostile – there are GDPR-compliant alternatives such as Independent Analytics, which I use on all my websites.

Without being able to see inside all the websites to see everything they do, I am not able to pick a winner for this category.

Privacy should be a simple matter for an Architect website. Yours is not an industry that needs to run affiliate marketing programs, nor host user accounts or login portals for clients. Poor privacy practices are often because the freelancers who design and build these websites don’t know any better. When I describe site design as privacy hostile, I do not mean that the person who built it did so with malice; it is often just a lack of care and not knowing that better tools exist. It is, however, hostile to the user.

Technical Performance:

This test simulates a generic ‘average’ device over an average internet connection to score how well your site performs. Google’s Lighthouse rankings for page speed are as follows:

• “Good” = 90+
• “Needs Improvement” = 50 – 90
• “Poor” = 0 – 49

I’ve run this test against the page Google results send me to when searching for Cannock architects. In my Birmingham audit, I ran it against the homepage, but have decided to change this as the Homepage is not necessarily where your visitor actually lands when engaging with your business in this way. The more my findings represent real user experience, the more useful they are to you.

Architect	Mobile Performance	Desktop Performance
Alpha	46	73
Bravo	60	88
Charlie	98	100
Delta	79	99
Echo	48	75
Foxtrot	69	88
Golf	47	62
Hotel	87	99
India	54	91
Juliet	N/A*	77
Kilo	67	99
Lima	42	89
Mike	79	98
November	54	91
Oscar	47	94
Papa	71	90
Quebec	63	97
Romeo	73	89

*This site did not return a mobile score despite repeated tests. I’ve never known that to happen before. On my phone the site does load, but only the hero section – and then after scrolling only does the rest of the content and the header/navigation load in. I wonder if this was done to try and improve performance, but it’s an odd way to go about it – and not necessary, with consequences incurred by poor UX (User eXperience) instead.

If you’re interested in a more detailed review of your own website, and potential areas for improvement, I offer a paid audit service.

Key Findings:

• The average mobile performance was: 64
• The average desktop performance was: 89
• The average overall performance was: 77
• Cannock Websites score better for performance than Birmingham, by around 6 points on mobile and 8 on desktop (rounded values).
• Desktop performance is far stronger than mobile, by an average of 25 points.
• Mobile is not only lower-scoring, but higher in variability, with a 56-point range vs. only 38-point on desktop.

It’s instructive to consider the why behind any finding, though. Cannock architects do have better performance and this is a great thing to get right on a website – we know that Google uses speed as one of the factors determining rankings, and we know from experience that slow sites are horrible to use.

However, Cannock architect websites are also simpler than Birmingham firms. This is obviously in part due to their size – a big city practice will have a bigger and heavier website. But architecturally the needs of architect websites don’t vary by location – only their scale does. Many of the Cannock sites had older designs – naturally more lightweight because they use less images and videos, or the pages themselves have less sections of content, etc.

In the modern day, and especially for Architects – an industry where design and portfolios are paramount – this is a difficult design choice because page speed might be something Google cares about a lot, but Google doesn’t care about your portfolio – and yet, your clients do. There are two paradigms opening up here: having excellent technical performance is not the same as having an excellent website, and indeed there are sites with markedly worse performance that do a better job of speaking to their customers, and for that reason which are likely to generate a lot more interest and ultimately money for their owners.

Best Performance – S. P. Faizey:

Owing to a very light design and simple page architecture, S. P. Faizey takes a definite lead in terms of site performance, edging out by only 1 point on the desktop but a considerably larger 11 points on mobile relative to its closest competitor. This is right at the top end of possible website performance and is very rare to see.

Homepages & Design of Cannock Architect Websites:

Header Menu & Navigation:

A header menu should not re-invent the wheel. It is fundamentally a tool for navigation and must confine itself to that purpose in my view. For this reason, I dislike a lot of the ‘deadly sins’ I outlined in my article on website headers. Some Cannock architect websites committed these sins but I am pleased that the vast majority did not.

A good header should meet the following standards:

1. Clear labels that are easy to understand.
2. Logical categorisation – for example, “new builds” and “barn conversions” should sit under something like “services” and not “about us”.
3. Responsive on desktop and mobile.
4. Horizontal, not vertical.
5. Appears at the top of the page when the page loads (not after the Hero section, which I have seen!)
6. Pinned to the top of the screen on scroll.

Best Header Menu & Navigation – Minesh Patel Architects

As such, picking a winner was hard, because 13 (72%) websites got most or all of the basics right. The thing that tipped it, then, was the ‘feel’ (which cannot be conveyed in a screenshot). For this, an hounourable mention goes to Red and Grey for their nicely animated interactions but they were ultimately edged out by Minesh Patel for two reasons: Minesh Patel’s header remained pinned to the top of the screen when scrolling, making navigating the site easier when you’re reading half way down a page. And secondly, their CTA button is highlighted where Red and Grey’s is not, making it more likely to get lost in the menu – and the most visually proud feature is actually a three-dot icon which loads a full-screen menu, again beautifully animated – but it’s not the action you want a visitor to take. Minesh Patel wins for having the better UX, but it was a close call! Minesh Patel’s menu also felt more responsive on mobile, too.

Portfolios on Cannock Architect Websites:

Portfolios are a critical part of an architect’s website, and are principally what distinguishes your web presence from that of a trade. In a design and project-focused world, not having a portfolio is a remarkable disadvantage. 8 (44%) of the surveyed Cannock Architect sites did not have a proper portfolio, where 7 (39%) were just a photo gallery (the same thing that the trades use on their sites) and 1 was actually a Services page.

This means nearly half of Cannock Architects are missing out on the utility of a portfolio. Of the rest who did have this feature, several used them only to post the bare-minimum – often a photo or a few photos with minimal data such as the project year, cost, size, etc., with no write-up.

Aside from creating a deeper sense of trust and re-assurance in prospective clients, portfolios also have SEO advantages because your projects might bring in traffic from people searching for the project rather than your brand. They can sometimes rank for their own name.

I have seen a number of architect websites that have portfolios, but no system behind them. In practice, they paste a new picture with a paragraph or two of text into a page as if it was a Word document. This means no project has its own link, it can’t be filtered, and the page gets bloated and heavy as the portfolio grows.

A proper portfolio system is paramount to exploiting all the advantages of having a portfolio in the first place, and can scale with you gracefully as your practice grows.

The Best Portfolio & Why – JSA Architects

A portfolio is your chance to not just show clients your work, but also your thinking and how you solve problems. It is a powerful trust-builder for this reason. You can see my own for an example, and imagine approaching a web designer who did not have one – who do you feel more confident approaching?

JSA Architects take exactly this opportunity (and present it very pleasantly from a design perspective, too). Let’s do a quick break-down like I did with Corstorphine & Wright in my Birmingham Audit.

• Immediately given a quick overview of the project and a striking picture of it that I can’t see all of, encouraging me to scroll.
• A digestible but more detailed overview follows – explains the brief, and the problem the project solves (contemporary family home in a beautiful setting).
• Some gallery shots to break the reading.
• Alternating galleries and further info about the project, such as power efficiency (another benefit/solution) and quality of materials.

This portfolio is tidy and compelling, let down for me only by the fact that I’m highly confident the text is AI written or at least AI-edited, which loses trust for me (and is something businesses should seriously consider before using for exactly that reason). But this is a content concern, not a design critique: as far as the purpose and architecture of their portfolio goes they are the clear winners in the Cannock Market. Excellent job!

Closing Thoughts About Cannock Architect Websites:

Overall, Cannock Architect websites are less ambitious in their design than counterparts in Birmingham but this is to be expect given the economic differences between the two regions, and the types of projects and clients respectively. In Birmingham we see an expectedly higher representation of firms who deal with larger civil infrastructure projects, such as Corstorphine & Wright who built a skyscraper student luxury apartment complex in the middle of Birmingham. In Cannock, architecture services are more modest, often serving local homeowners and small businesses.

There is, however, room for Cannock Architects to improve their design if they so wish – and by so doing, make a definite impression over competitors in the eyes of potential clients comparing between them.

Cannock Architects could also make better use of portfolio systems on their websites, raising their perceived competence and prestige considerably by showing off their fine work. This isn’t a burden to write a sales pitch each time you complete a project – you’d probably hate that – but your work is no less impressive than the big city firms just because the scale is more modest.

Many architect practices that serve Cannock have glowing reviews, so customers love what you do! Publicise it.

The last area for improvement that I’d seriously recommend looking at is privacy and GDPR-compliance. While customers for architectural services are not the first demographic that comes to mind as being particularly privacy-conscious, it is nevertheless true that an increasing number of people do care about this sort of thing (and as a moral issue, not just a legal one), but it is also the case that the law has firm standards too – and these should be adhered to.