Your Law Firm Website Designer is Not a Marketer

© 2009, Brandon Cornett.

It's time for another lesson in lawyer marketing, courtesy of the Web Smart Lawyer. Here is today's lesson:

What does your law firm website designer know about marketing? If you’re lucky, you’ll have one of the few designers who also knows a thing or two about Internet marketing. But these folks are few and far between. More likely, you’ll have one who knows a lot about website design but very little about web marketing.

I’m not digging at anyone here. I just want you to leave this article with a good understanding of how the industry works. I have worked with more than a dozen web designers over the years, and they all had one thing in common — marketing success was the furthest thing from their minds when they created websites. After all, they are website design experts. Their training and experience related to how things looked and functioned, not what they produced.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it’s possible for a well-intentioned designer to actually harm your website marketing program, simply because he or she doesn’t consider the big picture. For example, I’ve seen designers who created law firm websites that were entirely image-based. Even the content was presented as a big JPEG image. Why? Because it gave them the most design flexibility. But they didn’t realize that this will also ruin a website’s chances for good search engine rankings. So focusing on the “pretty” side of the law firm website, they were actually harming the productive side of things.

What to Tell Your Website Designer

Tell your law firm website designer that marketing performance is equally important as site design. In particular, tell him or her you want a website that ranks well in search engines like Google. If they don’t know how to deliver this, you should consider hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant to advise the website designer from day one.

Tell your designer you want to make it really easy for people to contact you. This will increase the number of people who do contact you. Your phone number and email address should be easy to find. You might even include your phone number in the upper-right corner of every page (i.e., part of the website header).

Tell your website designer you want to add content to your site over time. A blog is a great way to do this, and most web developers know how to install them. You can use a blog to add new content to your law firm website over time, and it’s as easy as typing a Word document. It’s important to set these objectives early on, before the site design gets underway. It’s easier for a designer to build a blog into the plans from the start, but it can still be added on after the fact if necessary.