Law Firm Websites: Why Do I Need One? [LISI FAQs] - LISI

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Law Firm Websites: Why Do I Need One? [LISI FAQs]

February 19, 2021 | Blog

In 1998, LISI was founded to design and develop compelling websites for forward-thinking law firms. A lot has changed since then, but the importance of having a well-designed website as the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy has only increased in importance. In the past 23 years we have been asked a lot of questions about how (and why) to build a successful law firm website. I recently sat down with Founder and CEO Jason Lisi to get some answers to our most frequently asked questions. 

Why Do I Need a Website?

What type of website does my firm need?

Jason P. Lisi: The function of a website is dependent on the firm. Regardless of whether it is used as a lead-generation tool or one that merely validates the law firm in the eyes of people who already know the firm’s name, the site is a reflection on the firm and can bring in – or turn away – potential new business.

A validation website is one that is mostly for firms that get almost all their business from offline means, such as referrals from other attorneys, being on an approved provider list, or educational/networking conference participation.

These websites should primarily set a ‘tone’ for the firm online, establishing the brand promise for potential and current clients. Developing this type of website should focus on impactful imagery and compelling copy to express what makes the firm different from its competitors, locally or nationally. Finding this proper ‘tone’ is one of LISI’s greatest skills and takes place through discussion with firm stakeholders, such as partners, associates, staff, clients, and others.

A lead-generation website is one where the site’s main function is to attract leads for more business. Tone is important here, too, but the goal is more laser-focused. Search engine optimization and other inbound-lead campaigns are the driving force behind design and development of these sites.

Law practices that need this type of site include personal injury, family law, criminal defense, employee-side employment law, and anything else where (most times) an individual needs legal help and turns to the internet to find it. This type of website, then, is all about solving an identifiable problem, generally for a person who is unable or unwilling to ask friends or relatives for lawyer recommendations.

And, if in either case, the firm leaders think, “I’ve had my practice for 35 years without needing to get business from the internet,” well, consider what is going to happen when those veteran lawyers retire or otherwise exit the firm. Will the younger lawyers have the same level and volume of referral sources ? Is losing a rainmaker without creating viable contingencies really sustainable for future growth?

Can a new website really play a role in our growth?

JPL: Without a doubt! A website, especially for a law firm, can contain as much content as a paperback book. Pages with extensive attorney bios, histories of the firm, representative matters, recruitment materials, and diversity statements can be written at nearly any length, providing much more opportunity to express the marketing message than any other medium.

Consider if your firm takes on a new lawyer who practices in a legal area not previously covered by your firm. The website is the place to promote this fact, alerting current and potential clients to this new practice area. The website can encourage the viewer to pick up the phone, send an email, etc. to engage the firm in a discussion about representation.

With imaginative graphics and compelling text, the firm can show (as opposed to tell) potential clients about this new capability of the firm and why the firm is ideal for helping clients with the particular legal issue. Add in a well-thought-out content and search engine optimization strategy, you can drive prospects to your website and lead them to proactively reach out to your firm for their legal needs.

What’s more is that a website should serve as the ‘hub’ of all marketing efforts, be they social media, radio, television, etc. Driving users to your website allows you to encourage communication with your firm, which is key to obtaining the user as a client.

When do I know it’s time for a new website?

JPL: The shelf-life of a website is not as long as one may think. Functionality and technology improvements are advancing every year, and a site as “young” as three or four years can quickly seem like an antique. Consider things like web accessibility, lead capture functionality, client relationship management system integration, virtual event broadcasting, other marketing operations and technology components that a website from five or more years ago will likely not include. And then think of what will change in the next five years!

But functionality isn’t the only thing to consider here. Design preferences evolve over time – both individually and as a society. Things like dark mode are popular now, but for how long?

The Big 3: How Much, How Long, How Often

How much does a new website cost?

JPL: Roughly $56,328.25. But really, it’s like asking, “What does a house cost?” There are different types of websites for different needs and many, many features that could be involved. A website for a multi-city firm with 100+ lawyers could easily be $100,000+ while a solo practitioner website could be a few thousand.

Pricing elements to consider are whether the new website’s content must be written, if the firm needs new photography of lawyers and the supporting team, and the marketing personnel within the firm to guide the project internally.

And ‘cost’ extends to more than the number on the check sent to the website developer. You must consider the cost of the time a billable-hour lawyer and other staff has to set aside to consider website-development matters.

How long will it take to get a new website?

JPL: Most projects at LISI that involve a full website redevelopment last 6-9 months from initial kickoff to final launch. But, our experience has seen projects take literally a couple of weeks (for an urgency to meet a marketing deadline) to a couple of years (when lawyers making decisions go AWOL during the process).

However, in our more-than-two-decades of working with firms, clients rarely are waiting on us to complete something. We’re eager to work and love seeing the launch of our carefully crafted website.

How often should your website be rebuilt or updated?

JPL: A website of any complexity (such as for a law firm) has many moving parts, some of which may need updating or reevaluating throughout its functional life. The technologies that have to come together to produce the website that seems so familiar and easy to use are truly breathtaking. Sophisticated code has to be written to interact with a database, all of which sits on a server that is attached to a worldwide network, to which all manner of devices (with different-sized screens, operating systems, computing power, etc.) connect. This makes reevaluation of a website that is older than 3-4 years necessary.

But it’s not just the code and technology – aesthetically, times change as well. We all know an out-of-date-looking website when we see it and form judgments about the business that the website promotes. A law firm’s clients or prospects are no different. It’s essential to keep up on design, content, and function trends of both your competition and other professions to compare to your website. Vintage is great for classic cars and antiques, but not so great for websites.

What’s the Process to Redesign a Website?

How does the website redesign process work?

JPL: At LISI, we have a very defined and methodical process of working through a website project, taking a client step by step through the project, and spelling out the responsibilities on both sides. Having these process ‘guardrails’ in place better helps all involved to cope with along-the-way hiccups that sometimes occur.

Here’s a high-level walkthrough:

  • Discovery and Planning – This is where we kick off the project, gathering all relevant information so we can best plan the rest of the steps. This will include technical matters (Google Analytics), to be sure, but is more about how the completed website project will ideally support the firm’s efforts. In discovery, we meet with all available stakeholders to this website project – marketing and administrative staff, lawyers, sometimes clients, and other key people – to see what each wants the website to be. We wrap up the discovery step with a creative brief that contains research and the goals the client has for the project.
  • User Experience (UX)/User Interface (UI) Planning – With the discovery in mind, we then plan the ‘sitemap’ of the website and determine the content to appear on each page. On every effective website, each page should have a purpose, driving forward the goals of the site. In this step, we determine the pieces of content that should appear on a home page and every other page. We show what’s important to the firm by what gets a link in the main menu and submenus. We also plan the cross-referencing of page to page, such as links to practice areas from an attorney’s biography and vice versa. Search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is involved at this point, as the site’s structure plays a large part in ranking success. Just as in college when we were taught to make an outline before writing a long paper, this is our ‘blueprint’ for the site’s structure before we move to the next step.
  • Website Design – Probably the most fun part of the entire project, this is where we present the designs for the site to the firm along with a look and feel that will appear throughout the website. Focusing on the ‘shape’ of the pages first and then refining to individual font choices and stock photography, this iterative process involves a lot of show-and-tell as our creative team displays its creativity while explaining the intentions behind designs. We start with the home page, move to designing the attorney bios, the practice-area pages, and then the rest of the pages follow from that.
  • Production and Development – This phase is where we marry the design with the technology to produce a working website. From the discovery through the UX/UI process, to website design, we take all the foregoing and build the website to our specifications. Here we ask, “How will the content management system (CMS) control each page?” and “What is the fastest code to write so the site loads quickly.” Typically a go-dark period in terms of communicating with the client, there is not much to ‘see’ as the website code really works only when complete.
  • Content Migration – Most firms have a website when they come to LISI for redesign, so there is the question of how the content from the old website gets to the new website (if desired). At LISI, we are extremely careful about posting each piece of content on the new website because a beautiful website is ruined with slipshod content migration. Some website developers use scripts to shortcut this step, but it often results in mistakes and poor presentation. While manually moving content takes more labor hours, it pays off in less quality assurance (QA, explained further below) time and a better product.
  • SEO Research and Implementation – A specialty of LISI, our SEO team is intensely focused on having each page crawled by the search engines and appearing for the keyword terms intended for the page. We research what terms people are using to find a particular type of lawyer (e.g., “commercial litigator” vs. “business lawyer”). We create a keyword strategy for each page that indicates for which keywords the page should rank well. Then, the work turns to manually writing each page’s title and description tags (shown in the HTML code and read by the search engines) and other actions to make the pages ‘play nice’ with the search engine crawlers. Finally, we ensure the technical nature of the website, including a page-listing XML stream, is optimized for the latest search engine methods.
  • Quality Assurance and Launch – Our final step is to meticulously walk through the website to confirm that everything works in the best possible manner. We manually visit every page, click every link, and read every word so as to hand over to our client a ready-to-launch product. The client also reviews the site and reports anything that needs to be changed after launch. When all is set, the big day comes: launch!

As is clear, this is a deep, multi-step process that is designed for producing an outstanding website that can be the basis of almost any marketing campaign.

SEO and Responsive Design

What does it mean to create a website that is set up for search engine optimization?

JPL: In its truest sense, the term “search engine optimization” means making the website as compatible technically and accurate editorially as possible to rank well in the search engines. The search engines (and when we say ‘search engines,’ we can pretty much use the trademark “Google,” where 90 percent of all searches occur), have software ‘robots’ called website crawlers that come to a site to walk through it, soaking up text and following links. The crawler’s work is then transmitted back to Google to be put in the searchable index that forms the database you’re searching when you Google something.

The point of SEO is to make the crawler’s work as easy as possible. That means every page should be ‘indexable’ and every link should work properly. Every page should have a good title and description tag, as well as other technical elements such as H1 and H2 tags containing relevant keywords. The list of ways to SEO a page is long and the subject of study by thousands of SEO experts.

Oh, and the criteria for a well-SEO’d website changes often, so what worked five years ago is quite different today. Your SEO resource should be on top of these changes at all times.

What’s the difference between mobile design and mobile responsive?

JPL: The era of a separate mobile website is over. When smartphones and tablet devices first appeared, website developers would create the sites to sense what type of device (desktop vs. mobile) the user was using and route the traffic to either the ‘main’ website or the ‘mobile’ one. The problem in this was that the mobile website was, in most cases, a ‘redacted’ version of the main website, containing less than all the pages on the desktop site, which caused a different presentation on mobile. What’s worse was that because the mobile version was a separate website, content changes had to be made in two (!) places to make the desktop and mobile versions uniform. In our experience looking at these setups, this dual update routine was not often followed, most times leaving the mobile site with outdated information.

The modern – and proper – way to build a website for all devices is called ‘responsive’ design. This is where the code of the site senses the size of the screen on which it is viewed and rearranges elements of the page to fit that screen size. In the design step of a website project, the designer can design for each screen size and the developer can code the site to trigger one of these designs based on each size (called ‘breakpoints’). The primary benefit (other than looking and working very well on all devices) is that there is only one website to update and the out-of-date mobile site scenario is therefore not possible.

Alternatives to Creating a Custom Website

Can I fix my old website instead of starting with a new one?

JPL: As a lawyer would say, “it depends.” We, at LISI, encounter websites of all ages and states of disrepair when engaging with prospects. As we are rarely producing the first website a law firm has, we are almost always presented with a website already in existence. This has led us to create ways of analyzing whether a website is worth fixing.

First, technology – if the website is built without a content management system to allow in-house website updates, it’s almost always worth starting with a new website. If the website has a CMS but it is a non-standard one with questionable support, it is, again, probably worth starting fresh. On the other hand, if the website was just developed in WordPress and all the underlying systems are up to date, fixing other parts of the site may be the more cost-effective path.

Next, aesthetics – An old website looks old (for the most part) and most businesses don’t want that tone set for their marketing. New ways of presenting information and late-release mobile devices occur frequently these days. So, keeping with design trends is probably the best light for a law firm, which would mean starting fresh with a new website. However, if there is a look to a site that is in keeping with the law firm’s brand and doesn’t look out of style, perhaps a refresh would make more sense.

Why should I pay for a website when I can get a free template using a company like Wix?

JPL: That’s certainly an option, but so is replacing the engine on your car yourself – it can be done, but it’s probably not the best use of time or energy. The self-serve template places like Wix and SquareSpace are suitable for small businesses that have no budget, have a specific vision of how it’s supposed to turn out, and have the time to engineer the website-building system to meet that vision. We have met very few law firms that meet that description.

A further issue is there are compromises built into those self-serve website systems so they are usable by those not familiar with website design and coding. So, if you want to diverge from the set template (e.g., you don’t want a headline in the center, you want it in the lower-left corner), you are either out of luck or have to do some intricate coding to make it happen. And, once you’ve made some changes to the default settings, getting things back to the starting point is not that easy (trust us, we’ve tried several of the systems).

Finally, most of these template companies are not doing this for ‘free.’ Yes, you can set up the site, but having it viewable to the world may incur a monthly fee, not to mention all the solicitations you’ll receive from the company to upsell you. Granted, the fees are likely to be small compared to having a site custom-built for you but think of the time and effort saved by leaving it to the experts.

Ongoing Costs and Updates

What are the ongoing costs of owning a website?

JPL: Most of the cost of a custom-built website is in the design and development phase. Post-launch costs (other than ongoing marketing) are generally a fraction of this setup fee. Some costs to know about include:

  • Hosting the website: Every website has to be on a specialized server connected to the internet. Website hosting comes in all levels of sophistication, from bargain-basement GoDaddy hosting, to fully monitored and backed up Managed WordPress Hosting.
  • Renewing the domain name: Your website domain name (www.YourFirm.com) doesn’t technically belong to you, it’s rented from a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy, Verisign, and others and has to be renewed when its term is up. This is generally a low-cost affair ($10 – $35 per year), but beware of domain-name scams that urge you to renew from companies you have had no previous contact with.
  • Updates to the site: If your site has a CMS (as with sites LISI builds), then making changes to the website’s text and most graphics are without cost – you simply log into the CMS and make your changes. The only cost is your time. For more extensive changes, such as ones involving design or restructuring of the site map, this is where you would bring in a website professional who will generally charge by the hour or project.

As mentioned before, these costs are outside of those for ongoing marketing, such as continual SEO, pay-per-click advertising, and content development (if done by an outside writer). These could range from thousands to hundreds of thousands per year and would be part of a strategic plan to get the most out of the website for your law firm.

Will I be able to update my website when it’s finished?

JPL: Yes, the beauty of a website, especially LISI ones, is they are always able to be updated in a way that print or other materials cannot. Getting the website updated basically falls into two methods: have LISI make your changes or do-it-yourself. Both have their benefits.

Starting with the latter, almost all LISI websites are built on WordPress, the easy-to-use and powerful content management system (CMS) that powers more than half the current websites. Via a secure login, you can add, delete, and edit website pages (and many other elements) via a set of online forms and text boxes. If you’ve ever created a blog post, you have nearly all the skills needed to update one of LISI’s websites. Even if you haven’t, LISI offers full training with each website and our question desk is available for no charge to our clients. It’s a very simple process.

That said, many clients would like to simply send us the changes for us to make. We attend to these very quickly (many times within hours of receipt) and our client can guarantee the changes are made correctly each time. We then invoice for our work at the end of the month. This process saves firms time and gets their website updates made worry-free.

Law firm websites are where your clients and prospects go to validate who you are, connect with you for a specific need, and learn about your firm’s services, culture, and place in the market. 

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