One page per practice area, not a bulleted list
A page called Services with eleven bullets ranks for nothing. Eleven pages, each written about one matter type in the language a client uses, is what actually brings in search traffic.
Web design for law firms
The website is your intake department. Build it that way.
Nobody hires a firm because the homepage had a photo of a courthouse. They hire the firm whose page about their exact problem read like it was written by someone who has handled it, and whose contact path did not feel like a sales funnel. We build law firm sites around the practice area pages and the intake path, and we leave the ethics review to you with a site that does not make it harder.
Builds start at $500 and are quoted per project. Hosting starts at $15 a month. See the rest of our web design work.
Practice area pages are the whole search strategy
Everything else on a law firm site supports these pages. Get them right and the homepage stops mattering.
Write it the way the client says it
People search for what happened to them, not for the statute. Someone types what to do after a car accident in Ohio, not motor vehicle tort litigation. The heading should meet them where they are and the body can be precise.
Say what you do not take
A criminal defense firm that does not handle federal cases should say so. Screening on the page costs you nothing and saves your intake staff an hour a week.
Fees, or at least the structure
Contingency, flat, hourly, retainer. You do not have to publish a rate to publish a structure, and the structure is what most people are trying to work out before they call.
Intake, without turning the website into a file room
A prospective client will type more than they should into any box you give them. The design job is to collect what a conflict check needs and stop there.
What the intake path should do
- Ask for enough to run a conflict check: names of the other parties, the county, and roughly when it happened
- A clear notice that submitting the form does not create an attorney-client relationship
- A short form on the practice area page, not a long one buried on a contact page
- Phone, form, and email all offered, because different clients will only use one of them
- Delivery into whatever case management or intake system the firm already runs
What we keep off the site
- Do not invite people to describe their case in detail in an open text box
- Do not send matter detail through a plain email relay to a shared inbox
- Do not run a third-party chat widget on a page where someone is typing about their case
- Do not use a form vendor that stores submissions somewhere the firm has not vetted
- Do not leave submissions sitting in the website database after they reach the firm
The attorney bio is the second most visited page on the site
After the practice area page, people go look at the person. Give each attorney a real page: admissions, law school, years in practice, the kinds of matters they carry, and a photograph taken this decade. A bio that is three sentences long reads as a firm that does not want to be looked at closely.
These pages also carry your name in search. When someone is handed your card and types your name into Google, this is the page that should come up first.
Compliance details we build in
- The firm name and at least one office address on every page, so nothing reads as an unattributed ad
- Prior-results language handled carefully, since results depend on the facts of each case
- Testimonials and endorsements reviewed against your own reading of the rules before they go up, not after
- Jurisdictions named where the attorneys are admitted, kept accurate as admissions change
- A disclaimer that is readable, not eight point grey text at the bottom of a footer
None of this is legal advice about your own advertising obligations. The firm reviews and approves the copy before launch.
Questions from firms
How many practice area pages should we have?
One for every matter type you actively want more of. For most small firms that is between six and fifteen. The trap is generating a page for every conceivable claim: thin pages that all say the same thing get treated as duplicates and can pull down the pages that were working.
Will you write the practice area content?
We will draft it, but an attorney at the firm reviews and signs off before anything is published. We are not going to publish legal explanations under your name that nobody at the firm has read. The drafts are structured so review takes minutes rather than a weekend.
How do you keep the intake form confidential?
By keeping the website out of it. The form collects only what a conflict check needs, submissions travel over HTTPS, and delivery goes to the intake or case management system the firm already uses rather than to a plain email inbox. If you have no such system, we will say so plainly instead of pretending a WordPress form is a secure channel.
Do we need to worry about the bar rules on the website?
The rules are yours to interpret and your firm signs off on the copy. What we do is build so the obvious problems do not appear by accident: the firm identified on every page, no promise of an outcome in a headline, disclaimers that are actually legible, and admission jurisdictions on the attorney bios. Ohio attorneys will want to read the site against Prof. Cond. R. 7.1 through 7.5 before launch.
What does a law firm website cost?
Builds start at $500 and are quoted per project. The number of practice area pages and attorney bios is what moves it. Hosting starts at $15 a month and covers the SSL certificate, backups, and updates.
Bring us your practice area list
We will map it to pages, show you where the current site is losing the search traffic, and quote the build. Builds start at $500 and hosting starts at $15 a month.