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The appearance of your law firm website is one of the most important aspects of your online marketing campaign’s success. Your law firm will literally be judged by the appearance of your web site. It is essential to create a good design or hire an experienced law firm website designer to do it for you.
Poor web design is one of the leading causes of online marketing campaign failure. There are literally thousands of law firms competing for clients online. Most make very little or no money and end up closing their site in defeat.
I have received many messages over the years from struggling law firm internet marketers wanting to know if I could look at their site and tell them what they're doing wrong. Most of the time, I can tell them the problem as soon as their site has loaded -- poor web design. They failed to take the time to learn how to properly design their sites -- how to design a professional looking attorney website specifically designed to sell their firm.
If you really want to succeed, you must take the required time to educate yourself. When you begin designing your web site, your goal should be to create a template that you can use to create each page of your web site. This will give your law firm website a coherent look and feel.
A template is simply a web page "shell" that contains your entire page design, logo, images, navigational links and a specific area for your content. However, your template won't contain any content, as each time you create a page with your template, you'll save it with a different page name.
I highly recommend placing your entire page content within HTML tables. Tables will enable you to have complete control over your content and how it will be displayed. For example, you can create three tables, stacked on top of each other, for each section of content. The cellpadding, cellspacing and border attributes should be set to "0" to enable your tables to seamlessly flow together. In addition, the widths for each table should be the same. The top table would contain your page header content, the middle table would contain your content and the bottom table would contain your footer content.
As placing your entire page content within a single table will significantly increase your law firm website's load time, stacking your tables will enable you to benefit from the powerful formatting capabilities of tables, while at the same time, keep your site's load time down.
If you've ever designed a web page without using tables, you know how limited you are as to how your content will be displayed. Your text will be displayed right up against the left border and will span across the entire width of your page -- certainly not a good way to design a professional looking web site.
Tables will enable you to display your content in sections like a newspaper, set up a specific number of rows and columns, and even place additional tables within your main content table to create special content sections with colored backgrounds.
Some tracking services offer tools that can be used to breakdown traffic based on certain defined goals. These services can also be used to track the performance of paid advertising campaigns (such as Google Adwords), calculating ROI from these campaigns, and can be used to pick up trends that may drive strategic decisions for growing a law firm marketing campain. For example, an online marketer may see from this type of report that only a small percentage of visitors from advertising campaign A ultimately call the firm, whereas a much greater percentage of visitors from advertising campaign B call the firm. This type of insight may drive a business decision to reallocate funds from campaign A to campaign B, which is performing better - a decision that could directly impact the bottom line of the law firm.
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