5 Design Rules for Your Firm's Website

Submitted by kdm on Thu, 10/26/2017 - 16:24

In this day and age, there is no reason to not have a modern, well designed, aesthetically pleasing and functional website for your law firm. It can attract prospective clients and give you an edge over the competition if other firms’ sites are lacking. Your website is one of the most important marketing platforms that you have available to you—be sure not to waste it with a poorly designed site.

Here are 5 rules to follow when designing your firm’s website:

1. Keep it Simple

Keeping the design simple will allow you to emphasize your most important messages and help your visitors to quickly and easily find what they are looking for. For inspiration, think about the principle of Occam’s Razor: the simpler the solution, the better. William of Ockham wrote the principle as, “More things should not be used than are necessary.”*

Applying this to your firm’s website design can help to ensure that you are only providing the most important information and keeping the use of various design elements to a minimum. For example, your firm could have minimal text on its home page and clear navigation to your “Contact Us” or “Free Evaluation” pages. This makes it easy for claimants to reach out for legal aid.

2. Design with All Users in Mind

Prospective clients will come across your site using a variety of browsers and devices. For this reason, make sure that your website is created so that they can all view it with the intended design and have the same great user experience. Grid layouts can help you to achieve this, as they translate easily between different screen sizes. It’ll be important to have a user-friendly website so any claimant can access your site, regardless of disability or injuries.

3. Choose Colors with Care

Make sure to choose a color scheme that will allow you the flexibility to add contrast to your site and make certain elements, such as call to actions, standout.

First, pick a dominant color—a great place to start is your logo. This color should represent your brand, so think about what you want your site to convey. Want your website to exude energy and passion? Try red. How about enthusiasm and friendliness? Use orange.*

Next, choose a light color for the background and a dark one for text, or vice versa. Finally, select a bright, bold hue that complements your dominant color and will standout to the visitor. You can use this color for any call to actions that you want to emphasize, such as a “Submit” button on your site’s contact form. This is especially important for Social Security disability attorneys because clients are generally older and could have vision problems.

4. Keep it Consistent

Keep your design consistent across your site. While each page may have a different layout to convey the information most effectively, you never want your visitors to feel like they are on a completely different website when browsing your various pages. To make your site cohesive, stick with one color scheme on your website. Along the same line, each page should have the same font and size for headers and body text.

5. Pay Attention to Font

Keep the font for the copy simple and easy to read. Since the headers will be larger and have less text, you can use a more elaborate font. Something to keep in mind when selecting your typeface is the difference between serif and sans serif fonts. Serifs are the small, decorative lines on letters that you will find with many fonts, such as Times New Roman. However, if you look at text written in Helvetica, you will notice the absence of these serifs, making it “sans serif.” Best practice when designing for web is to use a sans serif font, as it is easier to read on lower resolutions.*

Having an aesthetically pleasing website is a great way to bring in prospective cases and instill confidence in current clients. However, if you are still looking for more clients to supplement your current caseload, try our legal case leads. To lean more about our Social Security disability, personal injury, employment law, or workers’ compensation leads, give us a call at 617.800.0089.