Your legal website should mirror your law firm’s abilities, reflecting the image you hope to promote. Today’s professional legal website is modern without being overly flashy, must avoid spelling mistakes, plagiarism, and any typing errors. Some additional Don’ts are:
Headlines That Fail Your Law Firm
When any potential client lands on your web-page, your headline must inform them about the type of law practiced; if your headline is even vague and uninformative, potential clients wonder if they have the right attorney for their case, and ensure prospective clients to re-consider. Ensuring that your header and description clarifies the area of law you practice and the clients being served. Remove the titles if you lack a descriptive and meaningful header for a section, and allow the text to shine, instead.
Non-Authentic Photos
Your legal website must include one authentic photo and not a stock photo of you and your team. Stock photos are obviously false and will not fool a discerning audience. If there is no budget available, a tasteful selfie will suffice.
Endless Paragraphs
Most website visitors lack the time to read, preferring to scan information provided to them. To keep them interested, provide texts in a scannable format, with short paragraphs of three to four lines in bold type, bullet points with internal links as effective ways for your content to hold client attention.
Advertising Your Law Firm
An obnoxious attempt to secure visitor attention is by placing your law firm banner ads on the website. These ads disguised as content are always ignored by clients. Use your content for promoting the law firm with advertising language and multiole internal links, adding calls to action at the page bottom.
Adding Dates on Blogs
As a lawyer, you must write informative blogs regarding legal matters for those who land up on your website. To avoid creating an impression that blogs are stale and dated, the contents must remain relevant even five years after penning it. Avoid making a legal website look dated by not adding dates, URLs, and headlines to your blogs.
Eschew Testimonial Pages
To add social proof to your website, testimonials add evidence of marketing claims. Adding a different social proof page would appear weak and out of context. Instead, add some testimonials to every website page, ensuring relevant page placement to provide proof of specific services promoted on that page.
No Endless Contact Forms
Evaluating and converting leads would require having your visitors’ contact information as not every website viewer will pick up their phone to call you. So, ensure your website’s contact form is designed without including a lot of fields and is short and discreet. Solicit minimum information needed to respond directly to the lead.
Thoughtless Call to Action
When soliciting your website visitor to submit information, how you do this, depends on assuring them how they could benefit. Instead of requesting potential legal clients to contact your law firm by slapping a dull and colorless “Contact Us” at the bottom of every page, proper use of appropriate colors, icons, and sizing must ensure it is visible. Also ensure creation of a subtle urgency within your message.
Conclusion
Your website is a valuable tool for your legal firm to create credibility and trust. Ensure avoiding inclusions that make your site appear dated or make it intimidating to repel visitors to the site.