Professional Law Firm Web Design
Your law firm web design says plenty about your firm and practice to your clients and potential clients. As a lawyer, you want what it’s saying to be positive, and you want it to be descriptive. You want to make sure your audience understands it. Therefore, you’re not going to throw in legalese that you use or legal jargon that’s only understood by yourself, your colleagues, and judges. Instead, you want your law firm web design to be written in plain English, you want it to flow well, and you want to make sure it says everything about your firm that your client should know. So, what goes onto your firm’s design?
Your Areas of Practice
If you’re in the field of criminal defense, you’re not going to describe personal injury or civil case work. You want to describe the areas of practice your firm specializes in, as well as the lawyers/partners/associates who serve in those areas. Make sure your adding
- Concise descriptions of the type of law/area of law
- How cases unfold
- How long cases might take
- What clients can expect, and so forth
If you’re not sure where to begin our team at Web Design of York can help in the practice area design pages. This is extremely important as it is going to take up a bulk of your site pages, so you want to make sure the content’s relevant and provides value to your visitors.
Your Years of Experience
Any client is going to want a lawyer with 25 years experience over one with 25 months of experience. Both might be just as good, but an attorney with more experience has
- Seen more cases
- Been to trial
- Won and lost cases
- Understands how cases will unfold
This allows a more seasoned lawyer to better explain to clients what might happen, and what the possible outcome should be. It also allows lawyers to forego guaranteeing anything, which a greener lawyer might do.
Legal Cases You’ve Won/Client Reviews
It’s also good to have a bio which includes cases you’ve won locally, especially if they were big cases, or were on a federal/national level. This highlights your expertise and says your better than other top lawyers in the same area of practice. It also highlights that you’ve been to trial so you know how cases will unfold and how to act during different phases of the case you’re involved in as a lawyer. This will help assuage your clients, and help them feel more at ease with aspects of the case as they’re playing out, whether or not a case goes to trial.
It’s also a good idea to incorporate client reviews. If you have had happy customers, ask them to leave reviews on your firm’s site. Also, add Yelp, Google, and other third-party site reviews to your site, and make sure to link out to those pages. This will add credence to what’s on your site, and is another avenue for people to see what clients are saying, from a site outside of your own firm’s website.
Possible Calculators (Settlement, Contingency, etc.)
If you are a personal injury lawyer, you’ll want to add settlement calculators, fees, possible damage calculators, and more. This will allow clients to plug in information to see how much they might get if the settle with the other party. The same goes to civil cases where damages might be paid out. When incorporating calculators onto your website, our team at Web Design of York will make sure to add a disclaimer that the calculators aren’t guarantees of how much clients will win, but rather, just an estimate. They still have to speak with an attorney and go through the settlement offer and negotiations prior to earning any damages in their case. This will protect your firm from clients coming back and stating you made false guarantees.
Social Media Bios/Profiles
With a professional law firm web design there are also links to social media. You’ll want to have a bio page for each of your lawyers on staff, that describes their area of practice and experience. You’ll want to have internal and external links which go out to their
- LinkedIn bio
- Twitter
- Facebook
And, other social media sites. Everyone today is on social media, your law firm website has to be as well. We’ll make sure to integrate it into the law firm web design services we provide for your firm.
Areas Your Firm Services & Localization for SEO
Local search is huge as it relates to SEO today. If people can’t find you locally, they’re going to visit a competitor instead. Think of this for a minute. When people search Google today, they run searches like
- Painters “near me,”
- Plumbers in “city/state”
- Carwashes near 186th and 32nd ave
Or, the top law firms in Dallas (or any other city). If you are not adding localized SEO to your site, your missing out on a huge contingency of searchers. This is greatly going to decrease your SEO rank. This is where a team of professional designers and writers at Web Design of York can help. We’ll include localized searches, verify your Google My Business page, and help searchers easily find your law firm, regardless of where you’re located.
A Mobile Design
Like local searches, mobility matters. For those local searches people are performing, they’re doing them on the bus, in an Uber or Lyft, or at work. They’ll need to access a site that looks good on a smartphone, desktop, or other mobile devices. If your site doesn’t load quickly and doesn’t look good on mobile devices, customers will turn to competitors. Our team will make sure to design a mobile website that looks good and one which loads quickly, to ensure you’re reaching your audience from anywhere.
When it comes to law firm web design, there are several variables that need to be accounted for. These are a few of the most important factors our team at Web Design of York will work with, to ensure your law firm ranks well locally and for the right keywords, via organic SEO and paid traffic if you choose to use this service.