Website Design Tips for Law Firms
Designing a website from scratch is no child’s play. You have to pay attention to numerous elements in a process that are extremely taxing and time-consuming. For a legal website, the struggle is even harder. Typical visitors of law firm websites are individuals in stressful situations, looking for advice, answers, and urgent representation. Thus, a legal site has to portray your firm as helpful and professional in a highly exhaustive yet straightforward and understandable way. These design tips will help you create a useful legal website for your law firm.
1. Focus on Navigation – First of Design Tips
The ease of finding information on a website depends mostly on the navigation bar’s presence and accessibility. Easy navigation allows you to post as much content as possible without cluttering your website. A right navigation bar should, therefore, not add to the confusion on your site. It should be placed somewhere at the top of your web pages and designed with visibility and accessibility in mind. Its elements should be well-spaced and directly worded, so visitors can easily find the information they are looking for.
2. Use Relevant and High-Quality Images
Images are a vital aspect of your website design. If you put up poor-quality images on your homepage and other high-traffic pages, new visitors will get a wrong impression of your site and services. Avoid blurry, low-resolution, and poorly formatted pictures both on your website and blog. It pays to post high-quality, professional photos relevant to your practice and city or state if you offer local services.
For example, if your law firm specializes in car accidents, images should feature roads, vehicles, and similar themes to help potential clients understand your area of expertise.
3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Use
The bulk of internet users in the modern world use smartphones to access websites and seek services online. If your site is not optimized for mobile, it won’t look as organized and professional to the mobile users as it will to the PC users.
Consider seeking professional services such as Black Fin’s Lawyer Design Services for a website that can be accessed easily from all devices.
4. Utilize the Whitespace – One of Best Design Tips
New web design tips trends will keep on emerging, but that is not to say that you have to incorporate them into your website. Select only elements that complement what you already have and can impact your conversion rate positively.
Overwhelming your web pages with pictures, videos, infographics, and animations will make your site untidy and potentially turn off some of your leads. Space your content correctly and leave enough white space so that visitors can pick out information quickly.
Web design is an inclusive process that requires plenty of skill and experience to perform. Law firm websites contain complex information that has to be broken down and presented in a manner laypeople can absorb. Complicating your design will only make your site less and less intelligible, creating an unnecessary barrier between you and your leads.
5. Use Your Law Firm Name and Logo
What is your legal practice or law firm name? Use it in your website URL instead of using exact domains such as Texasmesotheliomaattorney(dot)com. Although this was the standard practice in the early years of the internet, it does not affect your SEO ranking.
These law firm website design tips will help you to build brand recognition. In turn, brand recognition allows potential customers to identify your posts everywhere, both offline and online, instantly.
6. Use Your Brand Colors
If you want your attorney website design to stand out, use your brand colors. You can use your brand colors to add visual separation on various parts of your website, in links, background color, or on call-to-action buttons. Although it is comfortable and appropriate to use brand colors in different parts of your website, remember to provide enough contrast between text and background.
7. Stress About Your Advantage
What is your unique selling point (USP)? What is that one thing that sets you apart from other law firms specializing in the same practice area as you? That’s your advantage, and you should stress it. Your unique selling point can help potential clients relate to your law firm and decide whether you are the appropriate attorney.
You can incorporate your advantage in your tagline, use it in your headlines or the About page.
8. Make Use of Google My Business
Listing your law firm with Google My Business is easy and should be one of the first things you should do to make sure your site is findable on Google. It is entirely free and requires no technical knowledge. You are just needed to enter the necessary information about your law firm such as location, website, and law firm name. This information will help your business to get verified, and once that’s done, you can add more information, such as a description of your services and business hours. Listing your law firm in Google My Business increases the chances of your site showing up in search results when a potential client performs a search on Google for lawyers near their area.
9. Strong Call-to-Action – One of Best Design Tips
The primary objective of your law firm website is to move visitors through the steps of the buyer journey to conversion. In other words, you want potential clients to move from being aware of the services your law firm offers to get in touch with you or request a consultation. To achieve this, you need to follow the website design tips and lead potential clients through your website using great content and a strong call-to-action (CTA) that directs them toward a point of contact.
Consider these things when creating a CTA:
- Placement – Placing a CTA too early will put off potential clients. Provide some useful information that will earn you favor from clients. Remember to utilize the white space to draw the readers’ attention to your call-to-action button.
- Size – A call-to-action button should be big enough so readers can see it.
- Color – A strong CTA should stand out and draw attention quickly. Use a contrasting color with the rest of the page.
Make sure you have a call-to-action on every page from the About Us page to the Home page and attorney’s profile pages. It should also be included in blog posts.
10. Effective Content
Great content that is informative and persuasive helps to increase leads conversion. Make sure the content offers real value to potential clients, as it one of the most important website design tips. Consider the following factors when creating content:
- Quantity – The content should be precise but concise. Use words sparingly. Too much copy can be a turn-off and lead to reduced conversion rates.
- Style – Be customer-centric with the way you use words. Make use of ‘you’ and ‘your’ while using ‘we’ and ‘our’ sparingly. This helps to stress your focus on solving clients’ problems.
- Formatting – To make it easy for readers to digest information, use compelling headlines, sub-headers, bullets, bold italics, and lists.
11. Share Testimonials and Achievements
Sharing your achievements and testimonials from past customers helps you build credibility and trust in potential clients’ eyes. Testimonials are as powerful as personal recommendations. Seeing that you have taken and won a case similar to theirs, a potential client is highly likely to schedule a consultation.
12. Optimize for SEO – Last of Design Tips
Make sure your site is optimized for search engines to reap the benefits of organic traffic. SEO helps to increase website traffic and improve traffic conversions, and it is relatively cheap.
The above tips will help you create a professional, tidy, comprehensive, and easy to navigate website. Keep them in mind whether you are designing the website yourself or hiring a professional to handle the task.
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