Attorney Website Design

In speaking with attorneys about search engine optimization, we’ve received thousands of questions about the process. Many want to know what exactly it is, how it’s done, what works and what doesn’t. In discussing the necessity for high-quality information, many attorneys are quick to question how the search engines are actually able to crawl each website and decipher good information from subpar content. Once we had an attorney comment that Google must employ millions of web surfers to do this well.

What is your favorite color? It’s a seemingly straightforward question that we’ve all been asked. Most people are quick to answer with a simple blue, green or red. When we pose this question to our clients during the design consultation, we often encounter a similar response from clients who haven’t really given it much thought and instead go with the norm. They explain that they want their site colors to be blue and gray or white and blue; they’ve taken their cues from competitors and assume that these colors must be optimal for performance. The truth is that most of the neutral color schemes have been overused and they fail to serve their purpose.

Once upon a time (really about ten years ago, which in internet time, equates to approximately 90 human years), Amicus Creative Media was founded by a small firm attorney who was frustrated with the limited website options for law firms. Many of the services were prohibitively expensive and few failed to provide attorneys with a comprehensive marketing platform. Amicus Creative was launched to fill this void and provide a reasonably priced all-in-one solution for the modern practice.

If you’ve ever been in the market for house, you’ve probably been warned that you shouldn’t make any decisions in haste.  Realtors and seasoned homeowners are quick to tell you that while you can always move, it’s never a simple process. A move is expensive, time-consuming and you can never predict whether it will be a seller’s market, if you do want to list your new home in just a few years. The same can be said of website development.

We often hear from attorneys who just want to “get something up” and rush to complete their, often overdue, website projects. In most of these cases, the firms in question don’t have much time to devote to the project and the end result is a website with a slew of pages with no content and a “coming soon” label. Of course, their intentions are always good, and while they plan to tackle this content down the road, this task is rarely accomplished in a timely fashion, if ever at all. If you find yourself tempted to launch your website with a coming soon label, consider the following:

Over the past few years, as a number of open-source platforms like WordPress have become more popular, the use of content management systems (CMS) has become more prevalent in the legal industry. This software varies greatly in terms of capability; some are very basic allowing website owners to simply edit a few core pages while others give a webmaster full management capabilities with the option to add or delete pages and even do more advanced tasks like manage upcoming events or an e-newsletter distribution list. One complaint we often hear from attorneys who work with even the most user-friendly systems is that the formatting of the content is incredibly difficult to control. 

Recently one of our clients subscribed to a third party e-newsletter service for elder law attorneys. The service provides practice-area specific content for its clients and sends out branded e-newsletters to the firm’s contacts. There were a number of links within the body of the e-newsletter encouraging the recipient to read more. Generally, this isn’t a bad strategy; it can help to get contacts onto your website where there are more ways to engage with your firm. Unfortunately, in this case, the links to “learn more” took the reader to a third party site which was managed by the e-newsletter service (though it was co-branded for the firm). In clicking on any links within this third-party site, the reader was then directed to a hub for elder law content which also featured a directory of local elder law attorneys. In this case, the attorney unknowingly created an action path for contacts which may have ultimately led them to a competitor’s site.

Each year, members of the Amicus Creative team attend a number of legal conferences around the country. Regardless of whether the event is for a local bar association or national professional organization, the members share similar concerns and hesitations when it comes to marketing. In meeting new attorneys, we always ask whether or not they have websites. Over the past few years, the number of attorneys who say “yes” has certainly increased but the indifference or dissatisfaction when it comes to those existing websites seems to have remained rather consistent. The fact is that a majority of the attorneys we meet say they have a website but “it could be better” or that it is downright lousy.  In digging a bit deeper, it is often hard to pinpoint exactly why the firm is unhappy and often it is due to a number of factors. Of course, to correct the issue, you must first get to the root of the problem. Below, we’ve compiled a list of the usual suspects:

When we ask attorneys how many calls they receive each month from visitors to their websites, the large majority are quick to reply that they’re not certain. This lack of information is in many ways understandable, albeit problematic if you really want to measure your site’s ROI. Of course, you can train your receptionist to ask each caller but that system can be susceptible to human error. Even when your receptionist is sure to ask the question of the individual on the other end of the line, callers often fail to answer this question accurately.  You can regularly check your Google Analytics data and try to manually determine which visitors turned in callers but that can be incredibly time consuming. Luckily, there is another way to more definitively track calls from your website – through the use of call tracking.

As we develop websites during the winter months, we often hear from clients who want to take photos of their staff and office buildings but, with the backdrop of bare trees and harsh weather, decide to wait for more favorable conditions. With warmer spring days here, it is the perfect time to schedule a shoot for your office with a local photographer. Here are a few things to consider:

If you take a trip around the web, and visit the websites of companies, organizations and even government entities, you’ll find that many contain animation. Simply defined, animation is a simulation of movement created by a series of rotating photos or frames. For many years, web animation was largely synonymous with Flash (it was created using Adobe’s Flash Animation software). However, as we detailed in a blog several years ago, HTML5 animation is now the prevailing technology allowing animation to be experienced across all devices.

Animation can be a great way to showcase the different strengths of your law firm, highlight multiple practice areas, showcase big settlements that you’ve attained for clients or can be subtly integrated to add a more professional feel to the design. If you’re contemplating animation for your practice’s website, consider the following: