Mays Proper

Neil and I went to high school together. When he was ready to put a real website behind Mays Proper in 2020, the conversation didn't have to start with introductions; we already had decades of trust to work from. That sounds incidental. It isn't. The kind of long-tenure designer-client relationship that shows up later in this case study only happens when the foundation is already there.

The brief was simple. Mays Proper had a brand, a body of work, and a growing client list — and no website to point any of it at. Neil needed an official home. A clean, presentation-quality place for his rooms to live, his services to read clearly, and his press to anchor.

The constraint underneath the brief was the part that mattered. Interior design is a category where loud websites are a tell. The studios that try hardest visually on their own sites are usually the ones whose actual rooms are doing the least. Neil's work doesn't need a website to perform tricks. It needs a website that gets out of the way.

I argued for the same approach I take with my long-term clients: hand-coded static HTML with light JavaScript. Built once, hosted simply, edited by hand whenever something needed to change.

For an interior designer, this is more than a technical preference. It's a statement of register. A static site shipped clean and quiet matches what the work itself looks like — restrained, considered, confident enough to not announce itself. A drag-and-drop builder with parallax sections and animated reveals would have fought the work. The site needed to feel like the rooms.

The other half of the argument was operational. Neil's evenings are better spent on his clients' projects than on a CMS. A static site I host and maintain means he sends me what's changed — a new project for the gallery, a new service tile, a new press feature — and I update it. The website never costs him time. The trust required for that arrangement is the same trust we've had since high school.

Restraint as a category fit

Interior design's design vocabulary is conservative for a reason: the rooms are the point, and the website's job is to present them, not compete with them. Mays Proper's site reads quiet on purpose. Generous white space. A clean type system that doesn't reach for novelty. A hero slider that moves only when it has to. The architecture supports the photography. Nothing on the page is asking for attention that the rooms haven't earned.

A services grid that closes the prospect

Neil's home page leads with a clean grid of services — Designs & Renovations, Consulting, Interior Design, Virtual Design — that reads at a glance and routes the visitor straight to whatever they're shopping for. The grid is the entry point because, for a small interior design studio, the prospect's first question isn't "who is Neil." It's "does he do what I need." Answer that question fast and the rest of the site has time to build trust through testimonials, press, and the work itself.

Photography placement that respects the work

Neil supplied every photograph on the site. My job was to place them so they read at full weight — large enough to show the room, given enough breathing room not to feel cropped, paired with restrained type that doesn't crowd the frame. Interior design photography is unforgiving. A site that boxes the images into thumbnails or jams text against them flattens the work. The Mays Proper site doesn't do either.

A site Neil never has to think about

Every word on the site is Neil's. Every photograph on the site is Neil's. The brand identity is Neil's. My contribution is the layout, the build, and the infrastructure that keeps it running. That division of labor is intentional. Neil's voice and Neil's eye are the studio. The site frames them; it doesn't replace them.

The site is hand-coded HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no build pipeline, no framework, no CMS. Every update is a code edit.

I host the site on my own infrastructure — same arrangement I take with most of my long-term clients. Neil doesn't manage a hosting account, doesn't track SSL renewal, doesn't get registrar emails about expiring domains. The infrastructure layer is invisible from his side. When something needs to change on the site, he sends it. When something needs to be renewed in the background, I handle it.

The architecture covers everything a small design studio's site has to: home with a hero slider showcasing recent rooms, services grid, testimonials, latest news cards linking to press features, contact. Mobile-responsive throughout. Built to load fast on the kind of devices a prospect's phone might serve it on, because that's increasingly the audience.

The site has been Mays Proper's official home since 2020. Five years. Neil hasn't had to think about the website in that time — he's been the founder of a working studio, not the manager of a CMS. New projects have been added, services have evolved, press hits have been linked, and the site has held up.

The "Designed by Eric Bell Designs" credit is in the footer where it has been since launch. Mays Proper has been featured in Mud and Magnolias, the regional design magazine, with the press cards on the site linking out to those features. The site sits inside Neil's growing reputation rather than trying to manufacture one for him.

That's the result for a 2020 small-business build: still standing, still credited, still doing the job it was built to do.

If Neil ever wanted to push the site somewhere new, the natural direction is editorial. A handful of long-form project case studies per year — a kitchen, a renovation, a virtual-design engagement — properly photographed and written, would lift the site from "studio home" to "design journal." The architecture would handle it. It's a content commitment question, not a design question, and a conversation we'll have when Neil's ready.