Web Design

Impress, Communicate, and Respond.

Impress: Your firm's web site should impress when it is first viewed. It should not detract from your firm's professional look. As media technology has advanced, every industry has adopted new these new advertising standards, except for the legal community.

The legal community for the most part produces bland, boring, and unimpressive advertising campaigns. However, the Internet now allows law firms and solo practitioners to produce high quality online advertisements that can impress clients, communicate the law firm's message, and respond to clients' needs and/or potential clients.

In order for a law firm to have an impressive site, your firm should seriously consider hiring a dedicated web designer. While many firms choose to produce a web site in house, many times these web sites are of poor quality and actually hurt the overall image of the law firm.

If your firm chooses to hire a dedicated designer, your firm should also make the choice of whether to hire a custom web designer or a template based web designer.

As with anything custom made, the price naturally increases. Of course, the benefit of a custom web design is the web site will be (i) error free, (ii) tailored to your firm's individual needs, (iii) unique from other firms, and (iv) professional in quality. Further, if the web designer has experience with search engines, the web site will be already optimized to achieve high search engine rankings. The downside to custom web designs, is of course cost.

If your law firm does not have a large budget or time to produce a professional web site, the law firm should consider buying a template based design that can easily be customized. Many template based designers offer a flat fee of $500 to $1000 for your law firm to produce a certain number of pages (attorney bio's, firm profile, practice areas, employment, etc.). This allows your firm to quickly build a web site for a low cost. The downside of a template based web design is that many times your law firm will not be able to create new content for that web site, or if your firm does change "template" plans, it may increase the cost.

Overall, if the firm has the budget and time, we always recommend hiring a custom web site designer. Depending upon the web designers skill and experience your firm could pay $5000 to $100,000 depending upon the size and complexity of the web site. Of course, with the custom designer your firm will find that the quality of the web site enhance the firm's image.

Communicate: Regardless od whether your firm chooses to produce a custom or template web site, the law firm should consider what message it wants to convey to the world. Is your firm a hi-tech firm that needs a flashy design or is your firm a more reserved "white shoes" firm that needs a more professional look. These rae choices that need to be made before your designer sketches ideas for your firm.

Once you have set out on a look of the web site, your firm needs to decide what content areas your firm will provide. Will your firm stick to the formulated"Firm Profile - Practice Area - Attorneys - Employment - Resources" navigation menu system or will your firm experiment with designing a portal dedicated to a certain practice area with links and/or your firm's contact information on each page.

We recommend, that your firm seriously consider creating a portal site for a few key practice areas. While your web site would of course have information about your firm, the portal site will allow your firm to be known as the "labor law firm" or the "intellectual property firm". So long as your firm updates the resources on the portal sit on a regular basis, your firm can expect to receive potential clients to your web site who are looking for answers to their legal questions. Once on your web site, your firm's information would obviously be made available should they have any additional questions.

Respond: Your web site must include a way for potential clients to contact your firm. However, it should not be placed only on a contact page. Every page of the web site needs to have a "call to action." This call to action could come in the form of an email link to an attorney, a contact form for the user to fill out, a phone number of the firm, or all of the above. However, since the goal of the web site is to gain potential clients, your firm should make it easy for them to contact your firm. Thus, we recommend placing a contact form on every page, along with the firm's contact information, AND a final sentence that says something like "contact our firm for a consultation".

Now that we have mastered the web design of a law firm web site, lets move on to finding a web host for your web site.