A well-designed lawyer website is easy to navigate and full of valuable, actionable content. It should be a pleasure to read, and current and prospective clients should be able to easily and quickly find information about the firm. Follow these 5 web design rules to improve your law firm website and convert more visitors into leads.
1. Include contact information in your header. Shorten the distance between your online visitors and your lawyers by putting the name and number of your law firm are at the top of every landing page. This header should be consistent for every page, making individual landing pages look more like “tabs” or home pages than lesser members of a bigger archive. Any of these pages could be your readers’ first introduction to your website.
2. Introduce yourself with a warm photo. There are many differences between law firm websites and other business-to-consumer websites, but one of the biggest is the importance of appearance. Lawyers will represent their clients in person, so it’s important to look professional but personable. To make a good first impression before the face-to-face contact actually happens, law firm websites need a clear and professional photo that introduces their partners immediately.
3. Attract more leads with calls to action. One of the most important goals of effective law firm web design is to increase the number of people who decide to call or click and initiate contact. While a corporate firm’s call to action may be different than the one for a personal injury lawyer, all firms should have them on the site Encourage visitors and nurture leads with active verbs that prompt direct action, such as “request a free consultation”, “sign up for our newsletter”, or “ask for legal advice”.
4. Make sure your website is compatible with mobile devices. If your website looks great on a computer screen but is hard to read on a mobile device, you will lose on-the-go leads. Make sure your layout choices, including fonts and graphics, translate well on mobile devices. Test your website on multiple browsers and devices, and avoid visual confusionby staying away from small fonts and complicated color schemes.
5. Integrate forms and comment boxes. This advice applies more to consumer-based practice areas. Calls-to-action work even better when you simplify those actions with buttons to click, options to select and text fields to fill out. Encourage people to directly interact with your website by requesting specific comments on blog posts, and provide contact forms with a few simple fields instead of expecting leads to draft their own emails for consultations.
