Having a well designed website for your law firm can make of break your success in getting new clients from the web. More and more clients are turning to a simple Google search before they make any decisions to hire a lawyer to take their case. You’ll want a website that conveys your message and shows you in a professional but also accessible form.
The last thing you want is to turn off customers from your website, at best your website should be a portal that turns traffic into customers. In this article we’ll cover five things your website needs to address if you want to have a successful website.
1. Is your message clear?
You’ll want to have a clear and concise tagline that visitors can latch onto and carry with them. The last thing you want to do is shove legal jargon down your visitors throat. Are you primarily a defense lawyer? Then make sure you communicate that in a powerful way. Try to illustrate how you are different from every other law firm out there.
2. Do users know where to go?
You’ll want your site to be incredibly easy to navigate and understand. You don’t want to overwhelm your user by providing them with too many options. In this case the less options you have the better. Make sure you define the overall goal fro your design? Are you trying to have users sign up for a free consultation, or give your office a call? Then, direct everything on your site to directing users to doing that.
Think of it as a hand-holding process. It’s your job to direct your users where to go and tell them what to do.
3. Do you illustrate your credibility?
As you simple listing all of your career achievements as bullet points, or worse yet just including your resume. People love to work with real people, not their corporate bios. See if you can inject some of yourself into your bio. You can still be credible while being human at the same time. Highlight your accomplishments and what makes you credible, but try to wrap it up in a story.
People are more likely to read stories and thus read your bio and understand what makes your credible.
4. Does the look and feel make sense?
Make sure the color, fonts and overall feel of your site matches your messaging. You don’t want to use super bright colors if you mostly do defense or drug related cases. The colors you use can either enhance your message or detract from it.
You want everything to be cohesive, all the way down to your font choices.
5. Are you plugged into social media?
Make sure you incorporate the use of social media into your design. You’ll want your clients to be able to access you easy, and maybe even follow you on your social media accounts. If you create great, sharable content, and share that across your social media accounts you might even be able to bring in new clients that way too.
I hope this article has been helpful in teaching you how to properly design and optimize your website to convert traffic into visitors. A website can be a valuable tool if used properly. It can become an asset to your practice.
Sources:
http://www.thelawinsider.com/media/5-tips-for-designing-your-law-firm-website/
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Author:
Zane Schwarzlose is a writer at the Loewy Law Firm, an Austin personal injury law firm. Zane thinks that getting good pictures of the attorneys is a key step in designing a good legal website.
