Web Design for Law Firms

What does your website say about your law firm? If it's not compelling, streamlined, and optimized for desktop and mobile users, it's a safe bet you are losing business because of it.

NextLevel's outstanding web design work will get your site noticed.

What Is Web Design?

People tend to think of web design in terms of graphic design, layout, and color schemes, but in fact, it encompasses so much more. It's not just about your website's appearance, it's also about mapping out user experiences and functionality.

If you've put your site in the hands of mere graphic designers, coders, or programmers in the past, they were only doing part of the work needed to make your site stand out to search engines and function well for the human users who visit your site.

What does it take to accomplish superior web design, especially in a competitive field like the legal industry?

Good web design is:

• Complex and nuanced
• Creative and innovative
• Highly focused on conversion

What real web design isn't:

• Strictly coding or programming
• Strictly visual design
• Limited to templates and formulas

The best website design for law firms is about more than aesthetics. When done correctly, it draws your visitors attention exactly where you want it, moves them seamlessly through your site content, pushes them through the sales conversion process and makes contacting your law firm for legal representation as simple and easy as possible.

Why Web Design Matters for Law Firms

Simply put, a great website design and user experience can be the difference between winning and losing new client leads.

First impressions matter and many clients very first interaction with your brand will be through your website. The design and user experience will have a significant impact on the perception they will have of your brand.

Web Design Even Affects SEO

There are many components of search engine optimization (SEO), the practice of strategically improving your website's position in search engine rankings. So many of these components are built into your website design. That means no amount of creating content, building backlinks, or garnering media mentions can make up for ineffective web design.

On the technical side, there are codes and tags that can influence your success at appearing in online searches. Because visitors are likely to get frustrated with slow-loading web pages, your site speed is another factor of web design that matters. A design service that focuses exclusively on your site's appearance might not take into account the lag time caused by eye-catching but prohibitively large images or videos built into your design. That's why it is so important that the professional service developing your law firm website understands every aspect of web design and balances each factor to create a site that runs and ranks as flawlessly as it looks.

The design of your website, and especially navigation through your website, also impacts your SEO. No matter what page of your website searchers first arrive on, they should be able to find their way through your site with ease. It's so easy to hit the "back" button that, if visitors have to stop to figure out how to move through your website, you've already lost them. They'll move on to the next search result and give their business to your competitor instead of you.

Even worse, you're not just losing this lead. You're also losing future leads. As search engines see visitors bounce right back to the results page instead of sticking around your site, they're coming to the conclusion that you're not providing what the searcher wants. As a result, they will drop your ranking in favor of someone who is delivering the information that satisfies searchers.

How Web Design Impacts Content Marketing

The design of your website dictates the organization and appearance of your content - and that content is exactly what drives search traffic and converts readers into clients.

If the design of your website makes it a challenge for visitors to find the content you create, then all that time and effort you put into content marketing is a waste. The people who need to see that content won't hang around long enough to figure out how to get to it - not when there are hundreds of millions of other attorneys out there.

How your content shows up on your website is a huge consideration. In a well-designed site, you will never notice factors like text readability or ease of access. Like the sleight of hand in a magician's act or the rules of grammar in a perfectly-constructed sentence, it blends seamlessly into the background. Your audience is immersed in the substance of the content, which is exactly what you want.

Yet we've all experienced how tiresome and frustrating it is to try to read books where the print is too small, massive chunks of text so close and cramped that it hurts your eyes, or webpages where neon colors on dark backgrounds are too distracting to comprehend.

When your website is at all difficult to read, whether due to your font, text size, layout, or spacing, you're driving away prospective clients.

How Web Design Helps Businesses

Online leads represent a bigger portion of law firm's client generation now than ever before. Make no mistake, your website isn't an "extra." It's a crucial tool of client acquisition, and it can make or break your business.

Consider your web design the first impression you make on every client whose case you want to handle. If your website lets that visitor down in any way, it's a compelling reason for them to cross you off of their shortlist and move on to the next law firm on the list.

Why Law Firms Need Professional Web Design

For solo practices and small firms, it may be tempting to make your own website with a drag-and-drop builder and save the money of hiring a professional.

Yet these popular site builders won't put in the research needed to optimize your law firm website for conversions. They won't put years of industry experience and thought power into brainstorming the ideal navigation path for your website. To get success from your attorney website, you need to put your web design in the hands of the experts.

Which Web Design Company Is Right for Your Law Firm?

There are a few key qualities you should you look for in a law firm web design service:

• Extensive experience in the legal marketing arena - because this industry is like no other
• A proven history of results, especially as it pertains to lead conversions
• Skills in every aspect of web design, from graphic design to coding and from user experience design to conversion rate optimization
• A comprehensive strategy that includes your website, landing pages, social media pages, marketing videos, content and all other aspects of your digital marketing efforts

The Problem With Large Marketing Firms

You might think going out and hiring the largest marketing company in the legal sphere is the right answer to your website woes - but many attorneys are making that same mistake.

What happens when a large firm handles your web design?

• Your site design will more than likely be based on a template - the same one the service uses for every other attorney - instead of on your preferences or your ideal clients' needs.
• You'll pay a high price for mediocre quality, because these large companies come with large overhead costs.
• Your website may already be outdated by the time it's launched. Google's algorithms can change overnight, but large marketing agencies are slow to update the cookie-cutter strategies and website templates they apply to all of their clients' accounts.
• You're not an individual, but an account number. As many of our clients who switched over from bigger firms have seen firsthand, you don't get personalized service or products from these companies like you do from us.

How NextLevel Designs Websites

At NextLevel, we do attorney web design differently.

Every website we create is optimized for lead conversions and personalized to your unique law firm.

We're not a template factory. We're a collaborative team of senior-level legal marketing specialists, averaging more than 10 years of experience per person, with outstanding creative and technical design capabilities.

What makes our attorney web designs different from others is our emphasis on strategy. We don't just create a website - we develop a full strategy for optimizing your law firm's lead conversions through innovative and thoroughly-researched web design.

Where other agencies are reluctant to make changes as technical elements and user preferences evolve, we're eager to make your website the best it can be, no matter what it takes. The big marketing company might not have cared about your ideas, but we won't hold your website hostage like they did. NextLevel will work with you to create a website you can be proud of, one that's the envy of your competitors and your new most important source of lead generation.

Law Firm Web Design FAQ

What Is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design is the term for websites that automatically adjust to fit the smaller screen sizes of mobile devices. Where once it was common for websites to be formatted for desktop users only, more than half of all Internet searches today are done on a mobile device. Your site must be accessible to mobile users.

Responsive web design is a more elegant solution than creating separate desktop and mobile sites. You need a web design service that not only incorporates responsive design into your website but also ensures that your site looks good and works well on all screen sizes.

How Will Web Design Change in the Future

Like other forms of technology, website design is constantly evolving. Our years of experience marketing law firms exclusively gives us valuable insight into what to expect in the future - and the NextLevel team draws on that insight every day.

However, the reality is that no one can promise you that they know for sure where web design for law firms is going. What we can promise is that, no matter what's waiting, we'll be ready to act on it.