Best Legal Website Designs to Inspire Your Firm

For any law firm or legal team overlooking the importance of a business website, there are three relevant statistics you should pay attention to:

• 96% of people seeking legal advice use a search engine
• 74% of all legal customers visit firms’ websites before taking action
• 69% use a smartphone and computer for research

But stats are just one part of the equation. It’s crucial to look to successful examples to see what they’re doing right with their web presence. With that in mind, here are some tips, with real examples, to creating a great law firm website that ticks all the boxes as far as solid design, functionality and branding are concerned.

Include a Clear CTA

One crucial feature of any website is a call to action (CTA). It’s all but useless to have a website that doesn’t compel the visitor to take some kind of action. And whether the CTA on your website is designed for lead nurturing, social sharing, form submission or another activity, it needs to be eye-catching.

Take Oykhman Criminal Defense’s website, for example. Notice the location of the CTA on their homepage. It’s in a prominent position and its red color draws your eye right to it. There’s an important lesson here. According to a survey by Legal Productivity, 70% of firms don’t have a direct CTA on their homepage. Don’t let your firm be part of that 70%.

Add Video to Your Website

According to Cisco, video views will make up 82% of all consumer traffic by 2020. With that being said, using a video as a CTA is an opportunity you can and should be harnessing now for your website. The potential is great for driving more traffic to your website through such things as video search engine optimization. This involves using keywords the same way you would for content marketing in your videos — simply research popular keywords on YouTube, and craft your videos around these terms.

Video also goes a long way in boosting conversion rates. According to Renderforest, including video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80%.

For example, Indianapolis-based firm Price, Waicukauski, Joven & Catlin has an understated website with little visual noise and uses a video as their CTA. This is one of the savviest features for any business website, be it the legal sector or any other industry.

Optimize for Mobile

Consider the fact that in 2015 Google started prioritizing mobile-mobile-friendly sites in their rankings. While more firms have indeed righted this digital wrong, there’s no excuse in this day and age to not have a website properly optimized for mobile use.

If you look at the website of Jenny Odegard’s firm on a laptop, you might make the mistake of thinking it’s too minimal. But there’s a strategy within this understated design, and you can sum it up in one word: mobile.

It’s in this optimization that Jenny Odegard’s website excels. While the vertical scrolling feature may seem cumbersome on a desktop computer, it’s highly intuitive on mobile and works like a dream. After all, vertical scrolling is how our eyes naturally process information on the smaller screens of mobile devices.

Add to the fact that, according to Google, mobile internet searches have been outpacing desktop searches since 2015, and you have all the reasons you need to get your mobile optimization right.

Raise Your Social Media Game

Your social media channels and website should work seamlessly to promote your online brand. Make sure to include visual social media buttons that are either displayed along the top of your website, on the bottom or along the side. You can also take it a step further and display your latest social post somewhere on your webpage so users can see your feed.

The homepage of global firm Kegler, Brown, Hill & Ritter executes this perfectly. One of their three prominent tabs is dedicated to social media. This goes to the essence of channel marketing: meet your audience where they are. In this case, it means making your firm’s social media accounts easily accessible from the homepage.

Add Your Email

Take a look at the website of Spiller Law, a San Francisco-based firm. Upon initial inspection, it seems to check all the boxes of a functional website, especially in that there are three CTAs on the homepage. Just as crucially, however, this website includes two vital tidbits of info: the phone number and email.

You may think it’s a no-brainer to include this info on your homepage, but you’d be overlooking an important statistic: according to Legal Productivity, 68% of law firms don’t even have their email address on their homepage. The takeaway is to not become a firm that focuses so much on design and flashy features that you forget to tell your audience how to simply get in contact with you.

Conclusion

The above examples showcase that a great legal website requires melding a number of important features. It has to be functional and eye-catching, simple yet informative. Above all else, give your audience a reason to take action, and make sure your website prompts them to do it.