10 Great Tips for Law Firm Website Design
Monday, 7th July 2014
Law firm and solicitor websites are something that we are becoming a bit of a specialist in.
Our latest one is for Parklane Plowden and we thought it would be helpful to share ten great tips to help improve your law firm website.
1. Establish your authority
You want to be able to demonstrate your expertise on your chosen speciality to let your potenital clients know that you know what you are talking about. For instance, having a blog packed with specialised content can end up being regularly cited by news outlets such as the BBC and Sunday Times.
2. Get involved in the content
As with many specialised industries, it takes years to accrue a solid knowledge base so make sure that you work with your web designers to write the content on your website as they will not be able to convey and sell your service as well as you will.
3. Use plain English
Linked to the point above, your potential customers are not experts which is why they hire you. Legal speak can be overwhelming at the best of times to most people so make sure you are clear and concise with the language and the points you want to get across.
4. Professional design tone
You will want to show that you are serious and professional so using inappropriately bright colours or comic fonts will not work. You also want to make good use of white space, keep everything well organised and pick a strong suitable font.
5. Building Trust
Law firms provide services and one of the best ways to quantify that a service is being performed well is to have your clients say so. Get good, realistic testimonials from your clients and use them across your site to help reinforce your sales pitches.
6. Your staff are your products
Linked to the point above, providing a service means that your staff help seperate you from the competition so let your users get to know them before they come with you. Good photography and impressive biographies of your main staff is a great way of making those first impressions.
7. Taking action
Writing interesting content is one thing but you want your users not to just digest this but to take action. Use strong verbs to help entice users e.g. download, share, comment, call, email.
8. Keep Fresh
The website and content you had 10 years ago or even 5 years ago isn't enough. Due to the advances in technology and the habits of browsing (thanks in no small part to devices such as the iPad) it means that we can do so much more with websites. You should be looking to show your potential customers that you are able to think ahead of the curve and keep relevant by updating your website design and making it usable on a range of devices (we call this responsive design).
9. Get a good CMS
Managing all this content is worth the payoff but make sure you get a CMS built that the people responsible for managing the content can use or you will be spending extra hours on training and retraining your staff.
10. Easy contact
If you think of someone making contact through the website as like a sale on an ecommerce site then it is imperative to make contact as easy and prominent as possible. Try to think about interesting ways of converting those users sitting on the fence by using some of the points above in a close proximity to your main contact buttons.
Want Us To Help?
If you are looking for someone to help give your law firm or solicitor website a refresh or an update then please get in touch.
