Your website, combined with a content marketing strategy, is your best source for generating qualified leads for your law firm.

Unfortunately, most law firms lack the personnel necessary to build and maintain a website, or may be stuck with an outdated or broken website.

If you’re a lawyer looking to improve your law firm’s web design to attract new clients, then continue reading this explanatory guide.

I’ll go over law firm web design basics, best legal website design practices, and offer tactics to make your website more persuasive to generate more leads.

What design features do I put on a law firm website?

The advantage of creating your custom website, as opposed to just creating a Facebook page, is that you will have total control over your website design and function.

Your law firm’s website will be the central hub to which all of your online content will redirect visitors to. But once people get to your website, you’ll need to keep them there.

The most essential law firm web design features include the following.

Logo

The symbols, colors, and styling of your company’s logo convey a powerful message to your audience. 

When you look at your law firm’s logo, how does it make you feel about your company? Does the logo communicate authority, compassion, and professionalism? 

If not, you may want to consider doing a quick logo revamp to modernize and stylize your logo.

Once you have your logo, you should place it on the top left of your website to improve brand recognition and the user’s experience. Make sure to use a transparent background so your logo blends into the background seamlessly.

Also added your logo to the top left of your website’s footer and contact page. 

Pro tip: Do not put your logo in the top center of your website. This will only confuse your visitors.

Mobile-friendly law firm website designs

Half of all internet traffic is on mobile phones.

How does your website’s design rack up when you view it on your phone? If you have to zoom out or resize the screen, I pretty much guarantee all of your mobile traffic will leave immediately.

In the past, web designers had a difficult time creating a mobile-responsive site, but these days most website builders such as WordPress and Squarespace have it built-in, which I’ll cover later in the article.

Typefaces and colors

Color psychology plays an important part in communicating your law firm’s mission and values. As do typefaces and font choices.

Traditionally, most law firms have used serif fonts. These are letters that have little “feet” attached to them. Think of the University of Michigan’s block “M.” 

However, today sans serif fonts are more popular and have a modern edge to them.

You’ll want to work with a graphic designer who can go through a branding exercise to learn what your values are, and then present logo and typeface ideas that will “wow” you and your audience.

Images

When you can, try to avoid stock photography and use professional photos of your office and staff instead. 

You should consider hiring a professional photographer to come into your office one day to photograph your building and do headshots for all of your attorneys. These can then be added to the attorney bio pages that will go on your website.

When you do need to use stock photography, use Unsplash or Pexel — they offer royalty-free images. 

Another tip is to add “alt-tags” to your images when placing them on your website. Alt-text means alternative text, and it’s the words that show up when an image doesn’t work and is also used to improve accessibility for blind people.

However, adding alt-tags is also an SEO trick to improve your website’s searchability.

If there is a particular keyword you’re trying to rank for, then you can add these terms to your alt-tag so your article will appear in more Google searches.

Videos

Placing a video on your website can boost your traffic and improve your website’s conversion rate. Not only that, pages with websites often rank higher in Google’s SERP.

By video, I mean an embedded YouTube video and not a banner video that plays in the background. Those are unnecessary and can seriously slow down your website. 

Also, videos are harder to produce, which means that other law firms may not have any.

Even producing one high-quality video can make a big difference in attracting more traffic than your competitors. 

Videos uploaded to YouTube can further be optimized by making sure your targeted keyword is in the header title, and then writing a long, detailed description for your video.

If you want to get your video shown as a video “snippet” on Google’s search results page, then create timestamps for your video for better searchability.

Just remember: auto-playing YouTube videos on websites is super annoying, and will likely cause your viewers to leave your site. 

Contact forms and calls-to-action for every page

Every page of your website needs to be optimized with contact forms, including persuasive calls-to-action (CTA) to encourage people to fill out a form or download exclusive content. 

You would think people visiting a firm’s website would automatically fill out a form, but even these people need a gentle reminder or nudge to take the next steps.

Consider using some of the following CTAs to get your visitors to fill out forms:

• Book your no-cost consultation today
• Get financial compensation today
• Download our free legal guide eBook
• Download our case study
• Schedule an initial consultation

It’s best to provide these different contact options to your visitors to increase conversion rates:

• Standard contact forms
• Click to call buttons
• Progressive forms, which are buttons that redirect visitors to a quick questionnaire
• Chat Boxes, just make sure you have a team member ready to answer questions or potentially risk annoying visitors by ignoring them
• Downloadable content, such as free eBooks, case studies, cheat sheets, and guides that people must enter their email address to receive

Attorney bios

Your potential clients want to learn more about your lawyers before reaching out to them.

It makes sense — lawyers must earn their clients’ trust, and showing your headshot and credentials will give your attorneys more authority.

Also, because you’ve created individual pages for each attorney, any time somebody Googles one of your law firm’s lawyers, your law firm website should be the first or second search result.

This is another law firm SEO tactic.

For a more engaging bio section, consider the following tips:

• Write what made you get into law. Perhaps it was a family member who was a lawyer, or a specific instance that made you passionate about law.
• Talk about your successes, but don’t give out too many details about particular cases.
• List your accomplishments, your school, background, and special certifications and awards.
• Avoid legal talk and use plain language when writing your bio. You’re trying to effectively communicate with the reader, and don’t need to confuse or intimidate them. If anything, you should make yourself seem approachable, since you’re trying to work with new people. 
• End with a call-to-action to set up a consultation

Contact

A contact page is one of the most essential features on law firm websites.

Even though your contact information will be all over the website, including the footer, it’s still good practice to create a specific page for contact information.

People have become accustomed to finding the contact page in the top navigation bar, so make sure it’s there to improve your odds of lead generation.

Google will also be able to pull your address and populate your office into the results of local queries for law firms, i.e, when people search “lawyers near me.”

About

Your About page is another essential page.

It’s your chance to write a detailed description about your company, its history, any high-profile cases you’ve worked on, and to share your mission statement.

An About page is another good area for search engine optimization. Use this page to add relevant keywords to your site to increase its visibility in Google searches.

Additionally, you could include positive reviews and testimonials from existing clients here. The American Bar Association permits members to ask for reviews, but under no circumstances should you bribe or compensate for them. That’s not only against the rules of the Bar Association, but it’s bad business practice.

Blog

Law firm websites absolutely needs to be blogging regularly. 

Some people think they can build a website and it will automatically generate traffic. That’s not really how websites work. 

If you’re not producing new blogs regularly, then Google will bury your website farther down their search results.

Why? Because they’ll think your company is no longer active because it’s not producing new content.

Google favors new content because it’s deemed “more relevant.”

There are many considerations Google looks for when determining the relevancy of a law firm website for legal-related Google searches, and some of the most important factors are:

• Backlinks
• Traffic
• Updated content

Blogging regularly will get your website more backlinks, which is when other websites link back to your website. 

Blogs are also the main traffic referral source bringing people to your website.

How do people find your website anyway? Usually, it’s through Google searches, either searching for “lawyers” or searching for specific legal advice.

The more blogs your website has, the more essential keywords it also has, which makes it even easier to find in Google searches.

To start blog writing, find your key practice areas, and then start writing explanatory blogs related to those practice areas. 

Here are some examples of legal blog posts:

• “How to file bankruptcy”
• “What you should know before filing for divorce.”
• “How long does the statute of limitations last for X”
• “What to do if you’re being sued for discrimination”

Landing pages for each of your firm’s practice areas

A good law firm website will need to consist of more than just a homepage, about, contact, and blog — you need individual pages for each of your legal services offered.

Again, this is an SEO thing.

You need to have more keywords on your website so that when people search for “malpractice lawyers” Google will find your medical malpractice page and say “This is a good match, we’ll list it in the search results.”

Besides SEO, your readers need quick access to this information so they can learn more about their predicament, and gain trust in your company to help offer them a solution.

Again, each of these pages will be optimized to have CTAs and contact forms to capture leads.

Footer

Your website’s footer is sort of like the last chance to capture more engagement from your readers, just in case they haven’t already filled out a form or clicked on any pages or blog posts.

Your footer should have this following information:

• Company logo in top left corner
• A dated copyright notice. Make sure the year is updated, or else your website will look inactive.
• A contact button
• Link to blog
• Phone number
• Office address
• Email address

How do I set up your own website?

At Kaleidico, all of our websites are built using WordPress, which is the world’s most popular website building software.

You’ll also find that Squarespace is another good option to build a well designed website.

Both options provide many widgets, or plugins, that offer additional features to your website, such as:

• Contact forms
• Built-in SEO tools
• Call buttons
• Social media icons
• Content sidebars
• And much, much more

WordPress and Squarespace also provide many free templates and paid templates that can be customized to your liking.

I will say, however, that these “drag and drop” style website builders may seem simple at first, but are more laborious when you try to create custom designs.

If you’re feeling intimidated or don’t have the time to set up a website yourself, consider hiring a full-scale marketing agency that can develop and design the website for you. 

How long does it take to set up a law firm website?

It all depends on the size of your law firm and the type of site.

At Kaleidico, we’re developing a new kind of “instant site” for law firms that we can launch in around a month. Of course, larger custom websites will take longer depending on their complexity and content needs.

As a general rule, we say that most law firm websites can be created in 1 to 3 months, or around 90 days. 

Hire Kaleidico for your law firm web design

Kaleidico is a full-scale marketing agency specializing in the legal industry.

We offer content marketing and other online marketing strategy, as well as lead generation strategy for lawyers.

Work with us to grow your caseload from your law firm’s website and content marketing strategy.

We’ll help build and design the best law firm website to generate qualified leads to fuel your business.

Kaleidico is a full-scale marketing agency offering web design and development, SEO and content strategy, content creation, blog writing, PPC, and graphic design services.