The Best Law firm Website Design and Attorney Marketing Explained

We have built our reputation on creating custom, user-friendly, and dynamic websites.

A good website is a living thing, constantly adapting to the needs of site visitors and your business. It’s your 24/7 spokesperson, your ultimate sales tool, and the highest expression of your brand. Site visitors will instantly get a sense of what it will be like to work with you and what makes your firm stand out.

Within seconds of reaching your site, potential clients will have formed an impression of your firm and whether they want to work with you.

Good design isn’t just about the look and feel of a site for law firms, it’s also about the site structure and crucially, how the website works for site visitors. We work with you to identify client needs and structure the site to meet those needs easily and efficiently. Client’s should never have to “figure out” your site. It should be clear from the moment they arrive how to find what they need.

Finally, even the most beautiful, well-designed site will look like a mess within months if it’s difficult to maintain. We build the backend interface to make it easy to add and modify content while maintaining the clarity of the original design.

Specifically, we make it easy to add and remove attorney and staff profiles and organize them by your firm’s practice areas. Need to add new practice areas as you grow? Fill in a short form, click publish, and it’s added. We also make adding blog posts a breeze.

At a time when just about anyone can take amazing photographs with their phones, it can be difficult to see why professional photography for websites is important. The main reason is consistency. Sharp images with uniform lighting, color, and style can make a website look professional and inviting. Fuzzy photos, differences in color tone, and overall differences in photography style can make a site look cheap and disjointed.

Consistency is particularly important when it comes to headshots of your attorneys. An “Our Team” page with unmatched photos can destroy an otherwise great design and give clients a bad impression of your firm.

We work with you to establish a photography style that works with your firm. Then we take steps to make sure that vision is carried through in every part of your site, and stays that way over time.

The best approach is to use our professional photographers for everything on your website – headshots, pictures of your office, candid shots, and event photography. As new attorneys join your firm, using the same photographer ensures the new portraits look the same as the original ones.

For law firms on a tight budget, we can supplement professional headshots with carefully selected stock photography, which can be considerably cheaper. For blog and social media posts, there’s a little more leeway on style. But even in these cases, the photographs should be as compatible as possible with the other photography on the site.

At little guy branding, we also offer professional video services to take your website to the next level. We’ve produced videos for small companies and major corporations such as Facebook.

We build our sites using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices to make your site easily accessible to Google. With advanced law firm SEO packages, our proven process brings your site to the top ranks of search results.

SEO is the discipline of getting pages on your website to rank as high as possible when a search is executed. Higher ranking in search results translates to more traffic to your website.

Our Process

1. We audit your current website architecture. Is there low-hanging user experience fruit that could lead to more conversions from site visitors? For example, are you using an image scroller in the header on your homepage? Studies show people do not engage with scrolling or sliding images. Plus, these slides are hard for Google’s crawlers to read, and they take up valuable space above the fold.
2. We determine the most valuable pages in terms of website traffic in the eyes of Google. What keyphrases are driving traffic? Which have the potential for a lot of traffic but have not been fully optimized?
3. We collect feedback from you about what your goals are. What does success look like for you? What metrics or Key Performance Indicators mean the most to you?
4. We audit your industry and competitors. Who are the dominant players in your space? What do their websites look like? What have they done well? What are the areas we can gain ground and capitalize by garnering more visits to our site.
5. We share our findings and provide our ideas on best next steps. From there, we determine a list of 3-10 keyphrases you want to improve. We also discuss whether or not additional efforts are needed – blog posts, eblasts, content and photo refresh, ADA compliance, site navigation improvements, and more.
6. We request access to WordPress, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and your Google My Business (GMB) page.
7. Once granted, we begin optimizing your site and start tracking performance.
8. At the end of the month, we summarize our findings with a monthly report and any recommendations we may have.
9. Each month we continue to monitor, research, develop content, and make website improvements.
10. Bonus Step: If additional activities will improve SEO, we will work with you to make these happen. These are things like writing blog posts, scheduling e-blasts, etc.

Good website design and search engine optimization help law firms grow, so we’ve made it easy to add attorney profiles, practice areas, blogs and other content and functionality to your site while keeping the site clutter-free and professional.

Content Management Optimized for Law Firms

As firms grow and their needs change, beautiful new websites can quickly get messy. Anyone who’s managed a website knows how it goes. You have 15 attorneys contributing to a blog, and each one has their favorite font size. Or everything has to be done in a rush. It’s the end of the day, your website manager is about to leave to pick up the kids, and someone walks in saying, “We need this award announcement posted five minutes ago!” or “Good news! We’ve just hired five new attorneys and added two practice areas. They’re starting tomorrow. Can you add them?”

Rush jobs and non-designers adding content can quickly lead to a tangle of different styles, strange fonts, inconsistent photo sizes, and an unprofessional-looking site.

Some website builders respond by locking down the design and requiring you to pay them to make for any little change, which can sometimes take days to make.

We build our sites so that you can update them yourself. For frequently added things, such as blog posts and attorney profiles, simply fill out a form, and our code styles and arranges the content to keep a consistent, professional look. For main pages of the site, which change less frequently and have fewer people changing them, you have more control over the look and arrangement of content. You can easily add new sections, say a COVID news area or a box showing an important conference announcement, with a drag and drop interface.

We can tweak this system to suit your needs. If you have a creative attorney who wants more control over how their blog post looks, we can set that up. Or if you want, we can make the changes for you, acting as a virtual marketing department.

A Powerful Platform for Whatever Functionality You Need

We build our websites on WordPress, by far the world’s most popular content management system, then customize that interface to work with law firms. Because the foundation is WordPress, we have access to a vast library of functionality that’s continuously improving. Need to start hosting webinars or conducting online courses? We can add that. Want to add an e-commerce store? No problem. If a solution doesn’t yet exist, it can be built because WordPress is flexible and open source.

Building on WordPress also helps future proof your site. Next time you need a redesign, it’s easy to move your content over to the new site. And WordPress has a good track record. It’s been around longer than Facebook and shows no signs of slowing down.

Helping out customers with disabilities isn’t just good business, it’s the law. We build accessible websites to industry standards and offer auditing services for existing websites.

1 in 4 adults in the United States lives with some sort of disability. This means that a quarter of your potential clients and customers may have disabilities that make it challenging for them to access information and services on websites. They might have trouble seeing text clearly, hearing audio on embedded videos, or navigating with a mouse.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses and other organizations that offer services to the public to make accommodations for people with disabilities. In recent years, court cases involving Target, Domino’s Pizza, Beyoncé, and hundreds of others have made it clear that the law doesn’t just apply to physical locations, but also to websites.

Robust technologies already exist to help people with disabilities — you don’t have to hire a developer to invent them. Screen readers, for example, not only read text on a page out loud, they also describe images and help people navigate a website.

The challenge is that these technologies only work if your website has been built correctly. We will build your site to industry standards and offer additional testing services to make sure your site is accessible.

We set up connections to crucial services, such as client portals and LawPay, and integrations with social media platforms, email marketing solutions, and job boards.

Any good website needs to be connected to key services. While WordPress is powerful, often the best solution is to integrate the website with other platforms designed for specific purposes.

No need to reinvent social media platforms for business – we can automatically send your new blogs to post on LinkedIn and allow site visitors to share your posts on social media with the click of a button.

People can subscribe to a newsletter on your website. Then via integration with MailChimp, every time you post to a newsletter on the website, everyone who’s subscribed to that newsletter list gets notified.

The site can also serve as a gateway to secure client-portal such as Clio, and link clients to LawPay.

We’re here to help, not just with the website, but with any of your marketing needs. We also provide hosting, security and maintenance for your website, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Branding

As a full-service branding agency, we can support your marketing department – or act as a virtual lawyer marketing department for your firm. Our services include logo and brand book development, social media setup and management, video production, photography, and graphic design of print materials, including billboards.

Hosting and Maintenance

Every site we build “lives” on our website hosting servers. The cost for the first year is built into the initial website build price.

If you have an existing site and are not happy with your current host, we can migrate your website to our hosting servers – it’s easy.

Need HIPAA secure hosting? We do that, too.

Our annual fee includes:

• Hosting Management & Maintenance
• Domain Setup, Management, & Maintenance
• Email Hosting, Setup
• Records Management (DNS, MX, A, etc.)
• Daily Backups of Files and Database
• Audit every 3 weeks to Update all out-of-date plugins
• Audit every 3 weeks to Update all out-of-date themes
• Audit every 3 weeks to Update WordPress Core Software
• 2 hours (to be used in 15 min increments) of content changes and content updates (editing, creating new pages, etc.)

We also complete daily scans to check for and eliminate:

• Malware
• Infections & Vulnerabilities in file content
• Infections & Vulnerabilities in database
• SPAM
• Latest known threats (Bleeding Heart, Trojans, etc.)

Additional bonus hosting features:

• Software added to increase caching speed and performance (adds up to 20x speed to site)
• Software added to increase general speed & performance
• Automatic Lockout of security threats, including IP Blocking
• Safe Password Security Add-on
• SSL Certificate (Yearly Fees, Renewal, Maintenance Included) and HTTPS
• CDN (Content Delivery Network – see below)
• Virtually 0% down time

CDN is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other Web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and a content delivery server.

This service is effective in speeding the delivery of content of websites with high traffic and websites that have global reach. The closer the CDN server is to the user geographically, the faster the content will be delivered to the user. CDNs also provide protection from large surges in traffic.