Determining how your law firm’s website should look can be tough. On one hand, you want to stand out from the competition—and there’s usually plenty of that. On the other hand, you have to be careful about maintaining a professional, distinguished, trustworthy image.
Fortunately, these two sets of priorities aren’t mutually exclusive. By sticking to fundamental best practices of web design for professional sites, and by applying some specific web design best practices for law firm websites, you can accomplish both.
So, whether you have an in-house team building or redesigning your attorney’s website, or you’re contracting with a professional web design agency, brush up on what your target market expects from your site. By meeting their expectations about the information and experience on your website, you start this new relationship off on the right foot.
This of course makes it much easier to convert the leads of incoming traffic into people who get in touch for a consultation. And then you take it from there.
Tips for Designing a Great Law Firm Website
- Make your areas of legal specialty and expertise immediately evident on your Home and About pages. Visitors want to know right away if they’re in the right place just in terms of whether your law firm will provide them counsel.
- Outline each attorney’s resume in individual biographical blurbs. Include education, experience, board memberships, major publications, charitable involvement, and some personal information. Bios should offer reassurances about qualifications and competence while also showing a personable, relatable side.
- Offer a little insight into your firm’s philosophy. Find your unique selling proposition to help separate you from all the other attorneys out there. They all say they represent their clients with honesty and integrity. Dig deeper.
- Don’t use a bunch of legalese in your website copy or blog posts. You may think it makes you sound lofty, learned, and professional, but it’s generally off-putting to potential clients. They want to find a lawyer who makes things easy for them to understand.
- Use a uniform color and design scheme on all pages of the website, including for different office locations, areas of specialty, etc. It’s important to present a cohesive, branded image for the entire firm to convey a sense of unity, ample resources, and strength.
- Invest in high-quality original photography for your site. Stock photos immediately send the wrong message on a law firm’s website, and can even subconsciously play into negative stereotypes.
- Incorporate trust signals like testimonials; links to reviews; professional memberships; corporate client lists; and quality photos of your attorneys, paralegals, and office staff. Prospective clients are nervous when looking for legal representation. They’re going to put a lot of trust in their lawyer, and they often have a lot on the line. Show them that you deserve their trust, don’t just tell them.
- Use optimized testimonials as one form of trust signal. Simply having a bunch of anonymous quotations saying things like “They did a great job!” and “They won my case!” doesn’t help make your website more trustworthy and compelling. In fact, it can do the opposite. Use real, attributed quotations with specific details.
- Maintain a blog offering helpful information for people who need the type of legal services you provide. This is a powerful way to show your expertise, earn trust, and appear generous. It also boosts your SEO, helps bring in targeted traffic, improves user experience and retention on your website, and gives people reasons to revisit, link to, and refer others to your site.
- See to it that visitors can easily get in touch with you. Have a Contact page in the top-level navigation. Include your address and phone number, but don’t neglect digital points of contact like an email address and web form. Users expect and often prefer the latter.
- Create dedicated landing pages for your individual legal services or target audience segments. These are helpful for SEO and conversion purposes, great for sharing on social media, and perfect destinations for digital ads.
- Optimize your site for local SEO. People searching for a lawyer specifically search for one in their location. Mention your city or town here and there on your website. Get your law firm listed in these online directories and also be sure that your contact information is published accurately and consistently across the web.
