If you think a website is an advertising billboard, you are missing the true value of a law firm website design. Your website should be a fully functional, engaging conversion machine. Have you reached 100% conversion rate meaning every visitor either calls or fills out the contact form? Probably not which means we have some sweetening up to do.
Law Firm Web Design Standards
All websites regardless if they are for attorneys or not, follow certain web design standards. An organization like the W3C sets standards for web design and applications, web of devices, web architecture, semantic web, XML technology, web of services, and finally, browsers and authoring tools. Professional web designers utilize organizations such as the W3C to remain current with the latest techonologies to improve user interfaces (UI) and experiences (UX).
Attorney Website Design Compliance
First and foremost, the Florida Bar Advertising Rules have to be followed in order for a firm to remain compliant. Cyberlicious® has a checklist [link to website checklist article] on the advertising rules for web design. Website accessibility is also a factor in order to remain compliant with laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Most organizations and laws require security meaning every domain should have secure communication protocols such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) and Transport Layer Security (TLS). Finally, in order to stay compliant with search engines their webmaster guidelines must be followed. Google has theirs along with Bing and Yahoo.
Law Firm Website Development
Website development for law firms is an extremely complex process. There are many factors to consider when developing a website, and Cyberlicious® recommends:
- a cloud computing environment preferably Amazon Cloud Services (AWS);
- experienced developers in serverless applications preferably Linux, Apache, Structured Query Language (SQL), Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and Python – for those data-mining and machine learning types;
- specific SEO for attorneys which includes structuring the data in JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD);
- a user-friendly, open source content management system (CMS) preferably WordPress or for larger firms, Salesforce and all their CRM and marketing cloud goodies;
- an experienced integration specialist with knowledge in application programming interfaces (API).
Conversion Rate Optimization
Back to that 100% conversion rate. That is the goal, right? Since we are a full service digital marketing agency, we run experimentations on many websites. From collecting quantitative and qualitative data to heuristic evaluation, we run multivariate tests on landing pages in an effort to drive conversion rates up. Remember, you are not your prospective client, therefore, we test fonts, images, colors, call-to-actions, navigation, content above and below the fold, you name it, we test it. Whatever triggers your prospective clients into taking action, we discover those patterns in our data analysis then implement that discovery into our web designs. If you think it will covert more prospective clients then you should probably test that!