Architecture practice rewrites its website in German and English

Situation

An architecture practice in Frankfurt-Nordend, nine staff, fees of about €1.1 million a year, specialised in residential conversions and extensions for private clients. About a fifth of the enquiries came from English-speaking households, many working for the banks and institutions in the city, and that share was growing. The German website was five years old and had been written by the partners in the evenings. The English version was a machine translation added in 2022. It turned the “Bauantrag” into a “building request”, translated the practice’s name and described the partners as “the architect team of our house”. English-speaking prospects wrote in anyway, then asked on the first call what the firm actually did.

Approach

We quoted the standard copywriting pack: a bilingual rewrite of about 5,000 words, which covered all 14 pages of the site. We started with a 90-minute call with both partners to fix the tone (calm, precise, no superlatives) and to list the ten things a private client wants to know before contacting an architect: fees, timelines, what the planning process in Frankfurt involves, how much the client has to decide. We then wrote the German first, page by page, and produced the English as a twin: a sentence that works in German gets a different sentence in English when the meaning needs it. Each language was edited by a native writer. Two revision rounds were included, and the partners used both, the first for facts and tone, the second for the project descriptions. We delivered the copy as a paged document with page titles, meta descriptions and image captions in both languages, ready for the web designer to paste in.

Result

In this scenario the new copy went live in week six, one week after delivery, without any change to the design. Both partners now send the fee page to prospects before the first call instead of explaining it on the phone. Over the following quarter the share of enquiries from English-speaking households rose from about one in five to about one in three, and the question “What is a Bauantrag?” stopped coming up on first calls. The German pages read in the same tone as the English ones, so a couple reading in two languages sees one firm.

What it cost

€2,400 as a fixed price, quoted before the work started. That bought the opening call, about 5,000 words in each language across 14 pages, native editing in both, two revision rounds and the metadata. A single short piece, such as one landing page or one sales letter, starts at €900 with the same two revision rounds. The work is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery, and for a monthly programme the first month is refundable in full.

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