Interior design client portals, and a lighter alternative
A client portal can mean anything from a shared folder to a full practice-management system with invoicing, schedules and signed approvals. Before choosing one, it helps to separate the jobs a portal does, because the job clients care about most is often the simplest one: seeing the design.
What full portals are for
Full portals centralise the business side of a project: proposals and contracts, invoices and payments, procurement lists, schedules and formal approvals. If you manage many clients and a lot of purchasing, that structure earns its keep.
The friction that comes with them
Portals ask clients to create an account, remember a login and learn a new interface. For a client who only wants to see whether the sofa will fit, that is a lot of ceremony. Every extra step is a place a client can stop, and a portal the client never opens does not help you.
What a single review link covers
A review link is deliberately narrow: one project, one URL, opened from a message. The client sees the design in their own space and your presentation deck on the same page, with no account. It does not try to run your practice.
It works well alongside a portal. Use the portal for contracts and invoices, and send the link for the moment a client needs to see the design.
What it does not do
- Invoicing, payments or contracts.
- Task management or schedules.
- Formal sign-off workflows.
If you need these, use software built for them and treat the review link as a complement rather than a replacement.
How link privacy works
Each review link is unique and unlisted: it is not indexed by search engines and not listed anywhere public. Anyone who has the link can open it, so share it the way you would share any private link, with the client and the people they choose to forward it to.