Trust is the most important resource for any law firm. Earning that trust begins with first impressions, and in today’s digital landscape, having a user-friendly law firm website design is the first step to building credibility. A good law firm website will not only reflect a company’s professionalism but will also improve its ability to attract, convert, and retain customers.
What Lawyers Need in Website Design
Potential clientele are looking for a law firm that’s trustworthy, efficient, successful and easy to contact. In other words, they want the perfect lawyer to represent them, and they need to know if they’re making the right choice.
As such, good content on a law firm's website should provide everything your client base is looking for. For a law firm to stand out in a huge and growing market, it must create a balance between innovative, eye-catching designs and simple, easy-to-use navigation that draws visitors’ attention and turns them into new clients.
Why User Experience is Important in Law Firm Website Design
First impressions matter, and potential clients want an excellent user experience (UX) when they visit your website. This initial interaction can influence their decision to recruit your services, making good UX design a crucial element in successful law firm web design and establishing yourself as a recognisable brand.
Great UX design aims to satisfy your target audience by keeping the following in mind:
- Who are they? And what do they need?
- What are their goals? And how do they hope to achieve them?
- How can your law firm satisfy their needs as seamlessly as possible?
Overall, the user experience is all about satisfying your customers. By creating a functional and enjoyable website, users will perceive and interact with it positively and will, thus, be more likely to convert to your brand.
SEO in Law Firm Website Design
In this growing digital market, your law firm’s brand will need to establish a strong online presence as a stepping stone to success. This is where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes in.
Most potential customers will search for a lawyer online. Thus, to get your business noticed, you must optimise your law firm’s website for search intent. SEO can help connect your brand with keywords that prospective clients use when searching for law firms online, putting your website at the top of the search engine results and making it more likely to get clicked on.
Why local SEO is important for law firms?
If you’re starting small and serving a specific geographic area, optimising your law firm website for local SEO is essential for hitting the top rankings in local search results. By appearing in local searches, you’ll establish your brand’s credibility and authority, winning the trust of potential clients. This, in turn, generates recurring organic traffic, increasing your firm's visibility to prospects searching the web for local lawyers.
Tips and Best Practices for Designing a Good Law Firm Website
Now that you’ve familiarised yourself with the importance of efficient web design for law firms, here are some tips and best practices for you to consider when designing your website.
Navigational Tips
Be innovative but not too unconventional
While making your website stand out is important, you must also strike a balance between simple familiarity and attractive creativity. Conventions like a top-page navigation bar and a logo that links back to the top are expected. Over-designing a page while ignoring the simple conveniences will create a poor user experience.
Example: When working on Mamee’s website, BikeBear focused on capturing the essence of childhood fun associated with the snack. With that in mind, they designed the website to invoke a carnival ride, using bright colours and bold imagery to invoke a sense of whimsy, while also implementing familiar and intuitive web features to make navigation easy.
Direct clients with a visual hierarchy
When visitors land on your homepage, you want to direct them towards important elements such as a CTA, the “About Us” page, or contact info. Creating a strong visual hierarchy will immensely help with this. One way of doing this is by creating a buyer persona:- Define your target audience and understand their needs and preferences.
- Map out the user journey by pinpointing clients’ pain points and information needs.
- Create a visual hierarchy structure with a clear distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary elements. Emphasise the hierarchy with different layouts, typography, colour, and size.
Layout Tips
Keep things clutter-free
A cluttered homepage leaves visitors confused and irritated, making them less likely to hire you. Simple is best here; creating an eye-catching headline that quickly and concisely answers your prospects’ questions and explains what you do and how you can help will ensure that visitors will immediately get a good idea of what to do next.
Example: Sol Estate makes clever use of white space to create a modern and professional design while delivering important details to readers in concise yet informative texts. Imagery of happy, smiling people and comfortable neighbourhoods adds an extra layer of trust that brings users closer to the brand.
Avoid overusing stock photos and videos
Having a strong visual identity makes your company stand out from the competition. Stuffing your website with stock media will work against this, making your agency seem generic or untrustworthy.
After all, if your potential clients instantly recognise a stock image, how would they know that the person behind the website exists? While a blog post can benefit from a cleverly placed stock photo or two, having an obvious piece of stock media on your homepage or “About Us” will only make you seem insincere.
Where possible, use custom photography or videos to demonstrate your firm’s independent identity. After all, other law firms can’t recreate what you made.
3. Accessibility
Make your contact information easy to find
A law firm that’s easy to contact is more likely to cause conversions. Customers will want to consult you through email or on their phone.
So, it's a good idea to keep your contact information (in this case, email address and phone number) highly visible at all times. For added mobile responsiveness, you can use click-to-call and click-to-email CTA formats. Of course, live chats also serve as a useful accessibility feature that lets people contact your firm without having to schedule later meetings.
Example: BikeBear puts a scrolling banner at the bottom of its web pages, advertising its email in bold, eye-catching text.
Aim for mobile-friendliness
Many users will likely be searching for lawyers on their mobile devices. As such, designing your law firm website to adjust to a smartphone or tablet’s screen size for optimal viewing will simultaneously enhance mobile users’ satisfaction and appease Google search, ranking it higher on the search results.
Example: Urby is a property investment app designed to appeal to a modern audience. BikeBear focused on creating an intuitive mobile app, combining familiar concepts with game-like elements to add a layer of fun to something conceived as boring.
Provide an online contact form
Your law firm website should make it easy for clients to request your help. The easiest way to do so is through an online contact form. An effective form should be:- Visually distinct
- Easy to read
- Short and to the point
- Easy to find
Website Content
Convey a sense of trust with social proof
Telling your visitors how good your lawyers are will not win their trust. You must display testimonials and positive reviews to give potential clients reason to believe your boasts. These social proofs will also demonstrate your firm’s competence and the effort it puts in to protect clients’ interests.Have a consistent branding
Your website's look and feel should be consistent throughout, giving it a polished and professional appearance that enhances the user experience. Colour palettes, graphics, fonts, and tone should all adhere to the brand design guidelines you’ve set up.SEO to Optimise Website
Emphasis keywords to optimise search intent
Answering a visitor’s questions is good and all, but a search engine won’t know that you’re doing a good job at doing so without having a few keywords sprinkled throughout the page.
Search engines like Google use bots to read your website, basing the search result rankings on what they found. Adding targeted keywords throughout your pages will increase the chances of them getting noticed by the bots and, thus, ranking higher in the search results.
To fully optimise your web page for search intent, it is important to include keywords in the following areas:
- Title tag
- Description tag
- Headings and subheadings
- Evenly throughout paragraphs
- The web page’s URL
Be sure to avoid keyword stuffing, as Google considers it a spam factor and will penalise a page for doing so.
Have compelling CTAs
A call to action (CTA) is a vital tool in attracting and converting prospects. A compelling CTA encourages visitors to take a step and sign up for your firm’s services. These are most effective when they are consistently included on every page of your site. From a simple “Read More” on the landing page to a link to a free guide on the navigation bar, a visible CTA will prompt visitors to engage with your site and take action specified.
