Technology is making it easier and easier to build a web page. In fact, you could even build a web page using Microsoft Word.
However, does it really make sense to build your own law firm website when you could simply purchase the help of an experienced web designer?
For solo lawyers with tight budgets, the answer to this question is not so easy. However, the good news is that even struggling solo lawyers should be able to afford quality web design assistance if they look in the right places. A good place to start looking is a free attorney web design guide we released called Seven Steps to Setting Up a Law Firm Website.
As with anything in life, you often get what you pay for, and if you try to do it yourself, you will probably get amateur results.
DIY Web Design Can Cost You Clients
The reason for this is that many DIY websites don’t compete very well online because they simply fail to perform against their competing sites in one way or another. They may fail to create a professional look or simply be poorly optimized for search engines. However, if you have not designed a website before, chances are you will do something incorrectly when building your own site. Worse yet, you may not even realize the errors until months later resulting in site malfunctions and lost client acquisition opportunities.
So if the competition is building their own website, they will most likely end up building a bad website for themselves because they are inexperienced at web design. Just as you wouldn’t fix your own car, you shouldn’t build a website for your law practice — unless you are qualified to do so.
Control Costs But Use a Professional
If you want to look successful, hire an experienced web designer and photographer to help you create your professional image online. You can still do some things for your website that will contribute value and keep your costs down, but programming and graphics is something you should seriously outsource to a developer. Otherwise, if you do it yourself, you may create an amateurish site that will make you look unsuccessful to your prospective clients.
Designing a good website is not easy, but technology is making it easier to design a bad one. It takes a considerable amount of time to learn web design skills and stay current with the advancing technology making most DIY web design ventures impractical for lawyers.
Therefore, if you want to get a good attorney website, you should hire an experienced web designer for the job. However, this does not mean you should be uninvolved with your website. To the contrary, by being involved with your law firm website you will increase the chance that it will become a successful part of your law firm marketing.
Things You Can Do to Add Value to Your Site
Here are a few ways you can actively increase the quality of a law firm website without being a programmer:
- Creating frequently asked questions and answers for a FAQ page.
- Creating blawg content that follows recent developments in the law and court decisions.
- Producing helpful pdf downloads for prospective clients. For example, some personal injury attorneys have created branded downloadable pdfs that explain what to do if your in a car accident.
- Providing recent news about your law firm such as announcing new hires or recent litigation victories.
However, in order to be an active part of your website marketing it helps to have a website that will allow you to update it easily. This will usually require investing in a dynamic attorney website powered by a popular content management system that allows you to update content via simple to use web forms. Having a website that you can update yourself will empower your web marketing giving you the power to create your own search optimized content at will. The cost for creating such a site can be so reasonable it often shocks me how many lawyers are not taking advantage of this opportunity.
LawConsuls produces affordable websites powered by the popular WordPress blogging and content management platform. If you would like more information about our WordPress web design services for lawyers and development rates, please feel free to submit a lawyer web design inquiry.
