Attorney Website Redesign
Our Redesign Services
Improve User Experience. Increase Visibility. Get More Clients. Website redesigns are an unavoidable occurrence for any site that plans to thrive on the web now and into the future. The question isn’t if your law firm will need a website redesign, it’s when
In fact, the time may already be at hand for you to freshen up your site, not only from a visual perspective but also from a technical and usability standpoint. Read on to learn how you can tell if a redesign may be worth the expense for your firm.
How Often Should I Redesign My Site?
Law Firm website design trends are constantly evolving. Every December and January, our design team researches the latest trends in website UX, color, typography, motion design, usability and more. There are many evolving trends each time we do this, and it is easy to see how some websites can start to feel outdated in 3-5 years. When researching this topic, three years was the most common answer to the question of how often you should redesign your website.
How To Update Your Website
Without a Full Redesign
If your website is way outdated in terms of design, structure, content, mobile responsiveness, etc., biting the bullet and doing a complete overhaul is likely going to positively impact your website and your firm the most, even though it will cost more. When done correctly, you can pump up your website’s online visibility and increase the number of targeted conversions (such as phone calls and form submissions) generated by the website.
However, if your website already performs well for the firm and the logic of “if ain’t broke don’t fix it” starts to make sense, it is possible to tweak the website design incrementally, piece-by-piece, page-by-page, or section-by-section. This will allow your site to last longer before needing a full redesign.
Our monthly Law Firm digital marketing and Law Firm Website Maintenance Services have incremental design improvements built into them. As you will see below, there are some tools we use to determine if there is any low-hanging fruit or issues with the webpages’ current design that we can address with a quick adjustment. Our goal is to continuously squeeze out performance gains from what we learn from all the data we gather on how users interact with the site.
Examples of Partial Redesigns
Without a Full Redesign
1. piece-by-piece
2. section-by-section
3. page-by-page
YEARS AS AN SEO FOCUSED AGENCY FOR LAW FIRMS
PAGE 1 GOOGLE RANKINGS DELIVERED
PAGES OF CONTENT WRITTEN FOR ATTORNEYS
LEAD CONVERSIONS FOR OUR CLIENTS
Questions To Ask Before Redesigning Your Law Firm Website
When we redesign a website for a law firm we use tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar to analyze how users are interacting with the site’s current design. By doing this, we can discover what is working and what isn’t working. We can run site audits to find technical issues that may be hurting the site’s ability to perform well on search engines. We can conduct a conversion rate optimization audit to determine how we can turn more of your website’s current and future traffic into leads. These analyses help inform us on how your new design should look and function.
What Are Your Firm’s Goals for This Website?
A law firm website redesign project should not be undertaken lightly. Reflect on what you want this redesign to achieve for your law firm. Do you want to increase your client base? Appeal to a different demographic? Focus on a different practice area? Look more modern? Using your website to maximize search traffic is the foundation of SEO for Law Firms.
In addition to these somewhat abstract goals, you want to define specific, measurable goals such as:
- Increase number of visitors
- Reduce bounce rate
- Increase conversions
- Increase time users spend on site
How Much Will It Cost?
If you ask 20 website marketing companies to give you a quote on a redesign, you’ll likely get 20 different answers. You may get some quotes as low as a few hundred dollars, and some as high as $50,000. The best options will lie somewhere between those two extremes.
The cost will depend on many factors, including the number of pages on your website, the complexity of the design, functionality, level of customization, and more. Before you start the process of a redesign, always know what the cost will be and make sure it is within your budget.
How Long Will It Take to Complete the Redesign?
Custom Lawyer Website Designs: The process of a full redesign is likely to take several months. From the time you sign on the dotted line to a fully launched redesigned website, 3-6 months is a reasonable expectation for most law firms. Smaller sites for smaller firms can often be completed in a little over a month.
Template sites and semi-custom: These sites take less time due to the nature of working within templates that are already designed and coded. If speed is a priority, smaller sites with less functionality can be completed in a little over a month.
You can help that time along by being responsive to your website redesign team. Try not to leave emails asking for feedback on design concepts or freshened-up content sitting in your inbox, as that can bring progress to a standstill.
What Slows Down A Redesign?
- Having a lot of back and forth in the design phase
- Having too many people involved
- Delays on getting items reviewed and approved
- Waiting on content from the client (Many of our clients hire us to write the content for them to speed things along.)
Should Your Firm Use A Template, Semi-Custom, Or Custom Design?
There are pros and cons to using each of these types of designs for a website. Below we will discuss the pros and cons of each.
Templates
Template designs can be a good starting point for new law firms or attorneys just starting out if they are on a very tight budget. Keep in mind you will be restricted to the template when it comes to design choices.
Pros
- Can save a lot of time getting a site live
- Can save a lot of money
Cons
- Can have a lot of unused code that slows performance
- There may be competitors out there with the same template
- May not be very flexible without requiring a lot of customization
- Code might not be search engine friendly
- Might break when adding in plugins and other functionality
Semi-Custom
Semi-custom templates are a great option these days and more commonly used. There are page builders, like Elementor, that have a large variety of templates with lots of customization options built into them.
Pros
- Saves time getting the site live
- Saves money compared to completely custom work
- Fairly customizable, though still limited
- Built to be more search-engine-friendly
Cons
- Can have less flexibility for adding plugins and other functionality
- Can suffer from a heavier code base impacting load times.
- Since built for multiple users in mind, can appear more generic looking compared to custom work
- Saves money compared to completely custom work
Custom
Custom designs might take longer and cost more, but you can usually get exactly what you want out of it. It’s a unique design built from the ground up, specifically for your firm.
Pros
- Produces a website custom tailored for your firm in look and functionality
- Will be truly unique on the web
- Maximized to be search-engine friendly and mobile responsive
- Built to be fast
- Should work with most major plugins
Cons
- Takes longer to get the site launched
- Costs more
- More decisions to make about design and functionality
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