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Tips for Designing a Legal Blog

by | Dec 1, 2014 | Articles, Web Design, Web Development | 0 comments

One of the most essential elements of successful law firm marketing is to incorporate a well-designed, high quality website. People will instantly make judgments regarding a company’s prestige and value within a few seconds upon viewing the firm’s homepage. In fact, nothing will deter a potential client faster than an out-of-date, poorly designed site. Here are 5 website design tips from Quinn & Scattini for designing a legal blog in order to convert more visitors to your site into paying clients as well as boosting your professional image.

tips for designing a legal blog

Designing a Legal Blog

Whether you’re a huge or small legal firm, it’s crucial to have a quality, informative website regarding your business. Current studies estimate that nearly 35 percent of all people start their search for legal counsel on the Internet. Therefore, your potential clients are probably going to find you online and depending on the quality of your site, they may or may not contact you. In today’s world, it’s very important to have an outstanding LinkedIn profile and more importantly a stellar website that highlights your legal expertise and excellent credentials.

The following design tips will offer you a guideline on what a first-class law firm website should ideally look like:

1. Less is actually more.

As the internet continues to evolve, everything is becoming much simpler, but more design-savvy in general. The main advantage of a simple, clean design is that it enables your visitors to focus on what you’re trying to convey. Most people don’t have time to read every paragraph or link on your website. Therefore, you need to get to the point right away and effectively communicate your key message in a direct, but simple way.

Here are a few tips to help you simplify the design of your law firm blog:

  • Use contrasting colors and substantial headers to help visitors easily navigate your site.
  • Decrease the general amount of text and also combine them with interesting images in order to get your point across.
  • Use white space in order to visually separate content and make the page easier for your visitor’s eyes to look at.
  • Write simple, easy to read sentences that people can understand.
  • Make your paragraphs shorter rather than longer so they’re easier to read.

2. Professionalism is key.

How do you feel when you land on a sloppy looking site versus a site with a modern, sleek, intelligent appearance? You instantly make a subconscious judgment whether you realize it or not.

A professional looking site is particularly important if you’re in the legal business, where building and establishing trustworthy relationships between lawyers and clients are the main objectives to effectively growing your practice. Therefore, it’s crucial that your site conveys a strong sense of integrity and professionalism. Use attractive color schemes, high-resolution photos, and expert looking typography in order to maintain a high-end professional appearance overall.

3. Incorporate one main call to action.

Today, there’s a key trend concerning modern website design that has one main call to action on virtually every page. Perhaps you’ve noticed several sites that integrate a huge image as a background, some important text that overlays it, and a big button that encourages the visitor to click on it.

It’s your job to make it incredibly easy for people to use and navigate your site and should ideally be effortless. Decide which action is the most important you want each of your visitors to take once they land on your site, and highlight it to the point that it’s extremely obvious without giving them several other options to choose.

4. User-friendly mobile capability is important.

Are you aware that nearly 64 percent of all cell phone users use their smartphones to access the Internet? Also, 33 percent of all mobile Web users utilize their smartphones as their main way of accessing the Web via a computer.

Amazingly, nearly 60 percent of all legal firms don’t have mobile-ready websites or don’t even know whether or not their site is indeed mobile-friendly. If your site is, you’ll be one step ahead of the masses in terms of having your site optimized for a mobile-ready experience.

5. Integrate proper organization and quality content.

Finally, the most important aspect of your site is the actual content itself, which means the words on the site, press stories, blog posts, video instructions, and profiles of lawyers. When it comes to quality content, there are some design tips to remember as you create your site, basically around the kind of content you want to provide along with the key placement and use of content across the site.

Critical Tips for a Professional Website

Keep it simple.

It’s quite possible to have entirely too much content placed on your site, or even content that’s too complicated, cluttered, or dense for the average person to actually care about reading it.

Try to keep the amount of your text on your main web pages to a minimum. Also, break up big blocks of text in addition to any long paragraphs with white space. Consider writing simple, short sentences and steer clear of using legal jargon or hard-to-understand vocabulary in general.

Design your content based on your goals.

More than likely your goal is to get hired by potential clients. But first consider why people visit your website in the first place:

Visitors to your site are searching for one of the following three things:

  1. Seeking free information that relates to their existing legal problem.
  2. Seeking lawyers and stumbled upon your site through a search.
  3. Looking you up from a referral.

Quality matters.

There’s nothing more important than presenting your visitors with useful, quality content in order to establish your professionalism and credibility. Also, there’s a greater chance it will be shared on various social media sites as well as enhance SEO (search engine optimization) and boosting traffic to your site.

Ideally, you should spend a good amount of time writing and creating your site. This premise alone can make all the difference in terms of building an effective site.

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