Legal Web Design: 6 Essential Tips to grow your practice
As an attorney, there are a few absolute must-dos when developing your website as a lead generation tool. There are also a couple of things to watch out for and avoid. Here’s our list:
1. Make it look good
A simple way to stand out from your competition is to have a better-looking site. Front-end design and user experience is highly important, and will set your site apart from the rest. From our experience as a leading San Diego web design firm, most small practice attorneys are simply too busy to devote the time to stay up-to-date on the latest design trends. A good website designer will have a portfolio of beautifully designed sites.
2. Own it
Many Legal web design specialty firms charge a monthly fee, and retain ownership of the website for a certain amount of time. This practice is quite unusual in the larger web development community and I really suggest you avoid it. There’s no reason you shouldn’t have full ownership and complete control of your website from day one.
3. Flexibility is key
The best online marketers understand that any conversion system needs constant testing, improvement, and tweaking. It’s more of a process than you might initially expect, so it’s very important that the site framework that you choose has the ability to be upgraded, altered, edited and improved as time goes by. There are a number of easy-to-use and economical frameworks out there such as WordPress. Make sure your solution is freely available for developers – that way if things don’t work out with your initial developer, you can always go to another firm for changes in the future.
4. Optimize it for search
What good is your site without people looking at it? Not much, really. And how do people find legal websites? That’s right, the search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not rocket science, but it makes a huge difference and should be done. The best SEO techniques are continuous and constant, and complement your practice’s marketing plan. Most attorneys are simply too busy with their practice to be able to effectively focus on SEO so they hire specialists such as us to take on that responsibility.
5. Make it FAST
Once you have people landing at your site, help make their experience positive by providing a super-fast website. Don’t keep your potential clients waiting – every second counts when your competition is only a click away. There are numerous page speed testing sites (such as Pingdom)- simply enter your site’s URL and click ‘test’! If your site is slow or gets a low grade, consider having a web developer take a look at potential optimizations.
6. Don’t forget about conversions!
Most ‘web designers’ or SEO specialists focus on traffic only. We take a different approach – what’s the use of having thousands of site visitors if you still don’t see any sales from those visits? We test your site to see what’s working and what’s not, then improve and optimize the site with a focus on your Call to Action.
Like I said above – none of this is magic, and truly anyone can do it. But when you want everything taken care of, with a ‘no worries’ approach, it’s worth finding a legal web design firm who’s experience and attitude matches with your vision for your practice.
