As most modern lawyers know, three things make or break your practice: 1) your logo; 2) your website; and 3) your font. We’ve covered logos and fonts and need to spend much more time on websites. Even if your law firm website is already full of awesome, there are still tricks to make it totally more awesomer. Here are some of those tricks.
Add More Cheesy Stock Images
We’ve covered this before in our wildly popular post Boost Your Website with Cheesy Stock Images. What we said then holds even more true today:
With the proper use of gavels, law books, attorney action figures, and thinking people, you can easily create a dynamic and powerful law firm website.
That’s worth repeating. And since we published that post, additional categories of cheesy stock images bear mentioning, such as Diverse Group of Jurors, Upset Judge Swinging Gavel and Pointing, and Business Man at Desk with Empty Beer Bottles.
Switch to Dark and Ominous Colors
For some of us, practicing law is a serious business, and your website should reflect that. Luckily, it’s easy to do with dark, serious, and ominous color palettes. Our favorite is black, but dark burgundy, deep purple, jungle shadow green, and thunderstorm gray are great colors to emanate “This firm doesn’t smile.”
Add More Text
Lawyers are known for using a lot of words. So if your website doesn’t reflect that, what will a typical visitor take away from the experience? That you are not wordy enough. A quick solution is to add more words. Lots more. For instance, did you include in your bio page where you attended middle school? Have you included all of your publications, including those in the PTA newsletter or in your local church bulletin? Have you done an adequate and lengthy job explaining how serious you are about using lots of good words? I’ll wager that you haven’t done all that you can to add more text to your site. Review your site now and add more words.
Consider Footnotes
Footnotes are a great way to hide words that you really want people to know that you know but cannot fit into your regular textual flow. From our research, most users love footnotes—especially those that are hyperlinked—because it’s like a sexy little interactive game of hide and seek. After all, Noel Coward explained that “having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.”1 Bingo.
1Supposedly spoken by Noel Coward. Found on the internet by searching on Google for “stupid history of footnotes” and ending up at one of those dumb and badly designed quotation sites.
