Lawyer Marketing Insights | 4 min read

Award-winning examples of law firm website design tips

Posted by FindLaw | September 19, 2023

Young professional at work on a website design

This is the second in a two-part blog series.

Any lawyer worth their salt knows that good legal work is about substance over style. Training, expertise, and hard work beat sparkle every time. But a professional presence, in your office and your personal appearance, can instill trust and confidence in the visitors coming through your door. The same is true with visitors to your firm’s website.

As your most important digital asset, your website shows online visitors who you are and what you offer. To close out our blog series, we’ll further explore what makes an award-winning website by offering several of the best website design tips for law firms.

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Home is where the hello is: Clean design elements for your page

Make it painless to contact

Use your head(er)

Continuity with other marketing tactics

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Home is where the hello is: Clean design elements for your homepage

First impressions are important, and your home page is the way your website greets visitors. Think clean, with lots of space between the design elements. You wouldn’t pack your firm lobby corner to corner with furniture; don’t pack your home page with visuals, either.

Colors

Use a maximum of three colors: a dominant color, a secondary color, and an accent color to draw attention to actions you want your visitors to take. The colors you choose are up to you. While there’s science behind color psychology (i.e., red is passion and action; blue is sea and harmony; green is nature and money), don’t let it stymie you. An experienced web designer can help you choose colors that speak to your brand and are pleasing to see.

Choose complementary fonts

As with colors, choosing a font is a personal preference. Many of the most-awarded law firm websites use more than one font. The key is readability and consistency. Most legal documents are written with serifs — small extensions at the end of each stroke of letters.

But many modern, beautiful websites use sans-serif types with equal readability. Stick with one or two fonts, and take care when adding italics, all-caps, or bold letters, which can be overwhelming to the reader.

Portraits or other relevant imagery

It’s human nature for our eyes to be drawn to others’ eyes, so make sure your home page includes an image of you or other attorneys from your firm. This home page portrait is called a “hero” image, and you are not only the hero of your brand story, but you could also be the hero of your web visitors’ legal issues.

Note: These are not mobile phone selfies. Professional photography is mandatory to convey an image of competence and confidence. Secondary imagery could include your office, your metro skyline, or your brand icon.

Make it painless to contact

Your website should make it painless for visitors to reach out to you. The phone still reigns supreme as the most effective way of engaging with clients, so the sooner you can make human-to-human contact with a potential client, the more likely you are to get hired. The most effective law firm websites keep their phone numbers in a prominent location on every page, like the top right corner.

However, not everyone likes picking up the phone as the first contact with a potential firm. Many of the best sites use contact forms where a potential client provides basic details about their legal situation, so your return call can start from a place of knowledge. Keep this form linked to the word “contact” in the upper part of your web design.

Your website’s header is at the top of the page and contains your company name, logo, phone number, and navigation links to other parts of your site. The best websites narrow down the elements in the header to just what’s necessary. Using drop-down menus under the navigation links can help keep the header clutter-free.

A header can be static, meaning it remains in place as the visitor scrolls down or clicks into sub-navigation pages, or it can be dynamic, meaning it can change depending on the page being viewed. The strategy behind the content of your site and the path you want visitors to take will determine which header style to use.

If your site has the ability to search its own content, adding a search tool into the header can get your visitors to where they want to go quickly.

Continuity with other marketing tactics

Strive to make your website consistent with your other marketing tactics. Anything you use to present and promote your business should have continuity in colors, fonts, design style, and messaging. Your website design should relate to your business cards, your social media pages, your newsletter, your letterhead, and even your office’s decor.

Building a recognizable brand through design repetition means your potential clients will grow to understand and believe what your firm has to offer.

Get started

If you’re ready to implement these tips and enhance your website design, FindLaw is trusted and used by over 17,000 law firms for web design and overall digital strategies. In 2022, we garnered 50 industry awards, including Best Legal Website, and received more than 20 awards in 2023.

Our team can answer your questions about websites. Schedule a consultation to get started on your firm’s mobile-friendly, brand-worthy, and client-receptive web design today.