Lawyer Websites: Face of Legal Marketing

A legal website you (and your visitors) will love

Having an outdated lawyer website can cost a law firm potential clients and leave attorneys at the bottom of the search engine rankings. Not only that, but firms may be missing out on the latest trends in website design and usability, leaving your visitors with an unprofessional impression of the firm.

This occurs perhaps most often when your website is not optimized for easy browsing from a mobile phone.

Key Fact: Today nearly two-thirds of internet searches originate from mobile phones.

For three decades, Vanguard’s website design and development services have helped build sites that generate more leads, rank better and reach goals. We’re committed to helping law firms succeed by creating websites and marketing strategies that work as hard as they do.

Jump to: Best practices | SEO | UX design | Navigation | Other fundamentals

Benefits of working with a trusted web design company

Effective website design for legal firms is essential for successful legal marketing because it attracts and retains visitors to lawyer websites, which is the primary object.
Website design also directly affects the strength of the site’s search engine optimization (SEO).
Poorly designed sites frustrate readers, causing them to leave, and are penalized by search engines in their rankings.
Website design should present an up-to-date graphic style while reinforcing a firm’s branding, in colors, graphic style and tone of the content.
Lawyer websites should focus on creating a positive user experience (UX) by incorporating UX design fundamentals such as excellent content, sound website architecture, ease of navigation, use of rich content, appealing layout and more.
At Vanguard, we have decades of experience employing these fundamentals of website design. Our team will work closely with you to understand your business, target audience and unique requirements to create a website that reflects your brand, engages visitors and drives results.

Getting lost in the shuffle with cookie cutter web designs?

Vanguard’s custom-built websites include the best of both worlds: dazzling aesthetics and powerful optimization that gets your firm noticed by search engines. Get ready for more leads and more business from a website that captures the attention of potential clients.

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Best practices for website design for legal firms

Designing an effective legal marketing website requires blending three skills: graphic design, coding and marketing. The site’s design should incorporate all three throughout the process. This requires a professional web design team that is not only up on the latest web design styles and trends, but also experts in collaborating with clients to bring their vision to life.

The design team must listen to the law firm as well as guide the firm on best practices. We consider this one of our greatest strengths.

It begins with defining the purpose of the website. The purpose of legal digital marketing is to provide visitors with:

The information they are searching for.
The services the firm offers.
A connection with the practice and an idea of what makes it tick.

Every element of a website should work in harmony to achieve the site’s purpose. This includes both the frontend (what visitors see) and the backend (where the site is constructed and coded).

Law firm branding in web design

The overall website design needs to reflect the law firm’s existing branding. An effectively designed website plays a strong role in projecting a firm’s branding and the image it wishes to project.

We recommend using a firm’s brand colors, logo and branding text judiciously. Having too many elements reduces usability and engagement.

Content is king of lawyer websites

The content on the site is the star player, not the lawyers. That content must be displayed properly, from page design to effective fonts. Visuals and appealing layout elements must be effectively integrated into the content being presented, whether that’s a page detailing child custody considerations or biographies of firm partners.

Hype, cliché, aggressive self-promotion and heavy-handed sales copy can kill the effectiveness of website content. A firm’s potential clients are sophisticated website connoisseurs and they are turned off by information they don’t consider authentic and honest. They need gentle persuasion to take an action (see CTAs and actionable appeal below).

How smart website design boosts legal firm SEO

Designing a user-friendly site for people also pleases search engine web crawlers, which translates into a boost in legal firm SEO (search engine optimization). For this reason, Vanguard’s web design focuses on making a site easy for web crawlers such as Google to comprehend.

These web crawlers look for signs that a website and its pages offer content a human visitor is searching for, presented in a clear and easy-to-understand way. Such factors encourage visitor engagement (time on site, number of pages visited, actions taken, etc.), which makes them appreciate the provider of that information. When assessing a law firm’s site, we take note of these engagement metrics.

The SEO reward for good legal website design is favorable placement on the search engine results page (SERP), the listing of results returned by an internet search engine. The higher up in the SERP, the more clicks a website will earn.

User experience design (UX design) for a lawyer website

Land on a poorly designed lawyer website and the visitor (potential client) will leave quickly. Web crawlers note this and penalize the site in SERP listings. This is why Vanguard emphasizes user experience (UX) throughout the initial design, function and ongoing development of a website.

From start to finish, the entire web development process should incorporate UX design to produce a visually appealing and user-friendly website that meets visitor needs and reinforces the law firm’s branding. While every person has different tastes and needs, focusing on UX can make all visitors’ interaction with a lawyer website as intuitive and enjoyable as possible.

Vanguard has developed its own custom-built website platform using WordPress as the base to enhance website usability and functionality. We routinely test and improve this platform.

Lawyer website architecture and user experience

Website architecture is a critical component of effective web design. It refers to how the content is organized and linked together on a website, making it easy for both people and search engines to navigate through the information.

It’s like a map that helps people and search engines find what they’re looking for on the website. This structure should be intuitive and easy to follow, ensuring that visitors can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.

A well-organized website architecture not only improves the user experience but also boosts search engine rankings by providing clear, logical signals to search engine crawlers about the importance of various pages and content on the website. Moreover, by making it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently, it increases the likelihood of them becoming clients.

A key element is to make it easy for visitors to find pages of interest to them with as few clicks as possible. The larger the website, the more important this is, and the more difficult to achieve. This often means highlighting the most important pages for visitors see such as personal injury lawyer, family law or tax law.

Another crucial aspect is grouping related content together in topic clusters, which are content elements that relate to a central topic. These related pages should be organized in a logical hierarchy to help human visitors and search engines navigate the website more easily.

By making the structure intuitive and simple, visitors are more likely to have a positive experience on the site and become clients.

Navigation menu principles for legal firm web design

Navigation is the way website design directs visitors (and bots) to the content of the site. Navigation menus, the categories generally listed along the top of website pages or in a menu icon (often called a hamburger), are a key element in this.

With nav menus, we follow Hick’s law: as options increase, decision time does as well. Vanguard’s law is that web visitors don’t want to spend time making decisions and will leave if faced with a bloated menu. The easier the navigation, the longer visitors stay on a site, which affects SEO and conversions of a visitor to a client. Consider these navigation menu principles:

Keep the main menu as simple as possible by limiting the number of items to five to seven.
It isn’t possible to list all pages in a main navigation menu, so include the primary topic pages.
These primary topic pages should include a drop-down menu of related topics.
Use simple wording whenever possible and avoid legal jargon.
It is essential to have a responsive navigation menu that works well on both desktop and mobile devices.

Other fundamentals of law firm web design

Mobile-first design is a must

The website needs to employ responsive design, which means it works well on any size screen. Every day, more people access websites by mobile phones. As a result, Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means that it will primarily crawl and index a website based on its mobile version.

Website security

Website design must also include security features to protect the site from being hacked, content from being compromised and to protect client privacy. Vanguard makes sure the websites of all its clients are up-to-date with the latest security features and safeguards. We bring to web design for legal firms the same website security and HIPAA-compliant rigors we have employed for scores of medical practices over the decades. These include:

Effective source control methodology for safeguarding, managing and upgrading websites.
Trusted third-party backup of client websites.
Secure website hosting services.
Secure website forms for client data submissions.

Web accessibility

Making a legal firm website accessible means there are no barriers to users with physical disabilities to access the material. Sites can achieve this by using screen readers and keyboard-only navigation. Not all web designers are informed on these practices.

Such accessibility measures can also improve SEO, as search engines consider the accessibility of a site when ranking pages. All legal websites should be designed for accessibility and display the Americans with Disabilities Act’s accessibility logo that floats along with this page.

CTAs and actionable appeal

Calls to action (CTAs) are design elements that encourage a visitor to take an action. These are key elements in converting that reader into a client. CTAs can range from simple buttons to more elaborately designed graphics with headlines, copy and visuals. All CTAs promote an action, which could be to call the law firm for a consultation, fill out a secure form or visit another page with related information.

Provide rich content

Use rich content, which means images videos, graphics, charts, tables, audio clips and GIFs. These elements appeal to the sensory sophistication of web visitors, providing visual and audio flair to the web design.

It is becoming more of a factor in how search engines reward a site and its pages. Every page should have at least one image. All images, graphics, videos and audio must be optimized for search engines.

Lawyer Websites: The Face of Legal Marketing