Refreshed website design for a dental practice in Columbus, OH. Conroy Consults provided consultation, website design, and complete custom website development in WordPress with the Thesis framework.

Reflecting on the features of a successful website design is often helpful in capturing broad inspiration. The following websites are not from the legal industry; however offer unique solutions worth reviewing. These websites were chosen as award-winning by other judges and I have chosen a few of my favorites that seemed most relevant to law firm websites from the following website awards: The Webby Awards, American Graphic Design Awards, and Web Marketing Association’s WebAwards.

Best navigation & information design

The ChurchShield site has clear and defined navigation that is easy to find with the bright colors aligned vertically on the left that stand out from the rest of the design. This provides for ease of use and functionality.

The NASA Climate Change website provides clear information about their most important message – the measurements of changes due to global warming. The data across the top section as well as the bright colorful maps quickly communicate the clearly designed information.

The MLB website also does a great job of organizing a lot of data so that it is easily found. The site balances the info fans are looking for with headlines and ads.

The Lending Club website provides key information in clearly defined areas and defines the call to action in a different colored box that stands out and makes the user’s path clear.

Best use of imagery

The following four sites each use gigantic images to convey the feeling of being or eating at these places. They each dismiss the idea of separating content above and below the fold, and rather maintain one large background image (except for BBs Restaurant).

Best in branding a place or emotion

The Glenelg Country School site immediately taps into the emotions of the target viewer with images of kids accomplishing great feats and being successful. The image of the school in the header and the surrounding green grass is also effective in providing a sense of the environment.

The Johnson Bank website has the tagline “Like family” which is supported in their use of colors and family-focused imagery and provides a unique personality different perspective than a typical bank.

The Cleveland Street District site recognizes that the potential viewers want to connect with local images, so features them broadly in the header.

The use of watercolor images rather than traditional stock photos in the Farm Coffee website is unique and offers a warm and nostalgic approach.

The South Court Dental site does a great job of creating a warm, friendly and welcoming feeling with their site, which is usually the goal of any dentist.

Website Design Inspiration from Other Industries is a post from the law firm marketing blog, Lawyerist.com

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Determining the pricing structure for your firm should be considered as a part of your marketing strategy. Your pricing strategy is not just an accounting activity, meant to balance the books but rather an opportunity to signal the quality of your work and support your firm’s branding. Price-quality signaling is an observable incident that affects consumer behavior. Whether or not your services are, in fact, higher quality does not matter necessarily, because the consumer believes the inputs to be of higher quality.

Determining Pricing

Rather than throwing a dart or guessing at the “going rate”, use the following simple equation to figure out an appropriate range for your pricing strategy.

• Cost & profit objectives: Start with your overhead costs and profit goals and work backwards from there.
• Demand: What is the market price? What value and benefits do customers perceive in the product and how willing are they to pay for it?
• Competition: How many competitors and similar products are in the market and in what price structure?

Once you have these three variables, you will know the minimum price you can charge to break even and the maximum price you can charge based on an estimate of customer demand. Together, costs and demand estimates provide you with the amount of price flexibility available in pricing your product.

Pricing hourly punishes efficiency

Pricing hourly seems much easier than flat rate pricing, but if punishes the lawyer who is more efficient. Here’s a picture of why this is a flawed pricing model: two lawyers are hired for the same matter, but one lawyer works much faster than the other. Both are equally talented, but one is far more efficient. At the end of the job, the lawyers turn in their invoices—he worked on it for a total of 18 hours and she a total of 7 hours. He is paid a respectable fee of $3600 and she $1400 for producing the same result.

However, there are times when hourly pricing is the right answer for an odd project or certain clients who are clearly not going to fit the normal model. In these cases it is important to have an idea of what your hourly rate will be which is also based on one of the pricing strategies below.

Four main pricing strategies

Rather than using the cop-out of hourly pricing, here are four main pricing strategies to consider that are most applicable to law firms:

• Premium pricing
  Are you the expert in your niche? Does everyone know your name and you offer solutions unlike any of your competition? Then you can charge Premium Pricing. Premium pricing is used when the product has one or more unique characteristics. This uniqueness differentiates the product greatly from competition and creates a significant competitive advantage. It is best to use premium pricing when substantial barriers to enter the market exist (i.e. it would be nearly impossible for someone to compete with your experience), and your potential customers are price insensitive because they value the benefits provided by the product.
• Value pricing
  Are you a new lawyer in a unique area of law, but want to build your firm so need to establish yourself? In this case, Value Pricing might be the right answer. Value pricing is a bit lower than premium and used when there are only a few competitors, when your service has a competitive advantage but demand or competition is likely to change.
• Market-oriented pricing
  Is your goal to provide a fair price as compared to your competition? Market-oriented pricing is pricing based on research gathered from the target market. To determine a pricing strategy using market-oriented pricing, a firm should compile information on the rates competitors are charging, then price their goods at an above price or below, depending on what the company wants to achieve.
• Penetration pricing
  Are you a new firm, wanting to offer gain market share and attract customers? Your strategy should involve Penetration Pricing where your price is set to attract new customers more quickly and easily. Once market share is gained, you should strategically increase your price. When raising prices, be careful not to alienate your current key clients and pull a Netflix or Verizon move that could create outrage. This typically involves sending advanced notice (a few times), providing clear explanations, and offering an alternative to the increase.

How do you know if you priced right?

You should not be winning every proposal, and your clients should not be overly excited about your price. After all, your firm is not Kmart, and you are not running a Blue Light Special. If your client emails back too quickly and sounds like they might be making a mad dash towards your “too good to be true” price, it probably means your prices are too low. If they write back and try to negotiate you were probably pretty spot on, and if they write back and say that this is well beyond their budget, you need to decide whether or not you want to figure out a way to work within their budget or whether you want to walk away.

When first starting out it might be necessary to be flexible, offer payment plans and negotiate your project costs. However, in my experience it is rarely worth it. It is easy to get taken advantage of and the best clients will value your time and price. The clients who question, argue and negotiate are letting you know how difficult they will be to work with (for which you should almost charge extra).

(photo: Shutterstock)

Why Pricing Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy is a post from the law firm marketing blog, Lawyerist.com

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A successful website is a combination of design, execution, and achieving the objective. To review these concepts in detail with a visual example as a case study, I will review the most successful website in my portfolio in terms of traffic, design, referrals, awards, and overall achievement of its firm’s goal.

Clear goal

From the beginning of this project I worked directly with the principal attorney at the firm to define the goal of the site. We discussed that the main function was to convey compassion and advocacy. While she definitely wanted the site to rank well and provide the functionality that potential clients were looking for, it was very important that the visual elements of the site were in line with her message and did not convey the negative aspects of her practice area (police tape, handcuffs, etc), but rather represented solutions and understanding.

Timeliness

Website projects often get stale and can drag on for ages because of other work, difficulty in content development, or too many ideas. However, this is generally just a waste of time and rarely makes the site better. This website was completed in about eight weeks, during which time the client was busy with a number of cases. The client was great at maintaining good communication and constantly working on small parts of the website when she had time in order to maintain some amount of progress. In my experience, sites that take too long often get off course, distracted by an idea they found, and steer away from the original goal. This has never been a worthwhile exercise and just creates unnecessary chaos and frustration.

Strong, compelling, and emotional images

We accomplished her goal by finding great stock images. All of the photos were purchased at a cheap stock image site and unified by making them all grayscale. A slideshow in the home page header includes images that are stunning, coupled with verbiage that corresponds with the solutions provided by the firm. There is nothing generic about the image—no columns, gavels, or law books. Which goes to prove that stock photos can be fantastic if used well.

Hierarchy of information

After determining the main goal of the site and how to achieve it, it is important to design your page layout (especially the home page) with a hierarchy in mind. In this case, the hierarchy can be followed with the F-shaped reading pattern; the viewer first notices the firm’s logo in the top left which provides for a great branding element, then moves onto the slideshow which is the most important element on the home page. As the reader moves lower on the page they notice the practice areas and information about the firm, however it is presented with less emphasis and plenty of whitespace to make it easy to scan through and find the relevant information for their purpose. The information on your website should be considered and laid out on the page so that it is both logical and functional.

Limited use of color for emphasis

The client’s logo includes a strong color (dark orange) that could have easily been overused on the site. By only using the dark orange color in a few places we were able to use the contrast of that color to draw attention to those areas as well as convey a greater sense of overall calm. Additionally, because the practice areas of this firm are dark, we were careful with the use of gray and black to convey a sense of hope. For example, the overall background of the page is currently a silvery gray whereas originally it was a much darker charcoal color that was just too ominous.

Promotion and Recognition

Finally, once the site was completed and launched, both the client and I worked to promote the website through blog posts, emails., and paid search marketing. We were also thrilled to be awarded one of the 25 best law firm websites by design blog visualswirl. Combined with all of the elements above, each of these promotion methods has had a noticeable effect on traffic and business.

A Successful Website: A Case Study is a post from the law firm marketing blog, Lawyerist.com

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Design by committee is the leading cause of website failure. When I hear the words “we need to gather our team and get everyone’s input” I realize the project is doomed. Often my clients believe that the system they employ is helpful when it only stands to derail the whole process. If you are starting or in the midst of a website design project consider avoiding these traps that could ruin your website.

Take me to your leader

Your website project should have a project leader. While it is fine to have other input and get opinions from the principals involved, it is critical to have one person in charge. Think of it in terms of The Apprentice. Someone needs to be responsible for setting the goals and making decisions. Without this, your project will be fueled by the Peter Principle, which explains, “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” This usually results in conference calls that accomplish nothing, and where people make statements like the following list of favorite sayings overheard in committee meetings:

My wife wants more circles.
My husband says it doesn’t hit him in the gut.
My kids say there are too many words.
My dog didn’t wag its tail.
The waiter said he’s seen something just like that in France.
I need more oopmh ?in it.
I’ll know it when I see it. So go back and make more.
I love what _____ did. Can you do the same, but with carrots?

A Singular Vision

Teamwork is great. It almost always results in work that is greater than the sum of its parts. However teamwork requires a singular goal or it can easily dissolve into a mess like this classic example of the classic “Process (aka Designing the Stop Sign)”. The leader should be the one to set the goal and ensure that all of the input and decisions are in line. Just because something sounds like an excellent idea does not mean it is right for your project. Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of TechCrunch wrote:

The iPhone is clearly a vision of a single core team, or maybe even one man. It happened to be a good dream, and that device now dominates mobile culture. But its extremely unlikely Apple would have ever built it if they conducted lots of focus groups and customer outreach first. No keyboard? Please.

Be swift

The quality of your website will reduce over time. The more time, change requests, and opinions that are involved the uglier your website will become. Your website is not meant to be the Mona Lisa and should not take ages to produce. If you are unsure about certain elements or how to communicate your needs, talk to your designer. If you have very conflicting views on your side then call on the designer’s expertise as their opinion as an outsider can make them extremely valuable. Listen to their suggestions and recognize that while they are the expert it is also their job to make you happy so they will often implement your bad ideas.

Minor changes?

Usually, the first few rounds of a design are the most coherent with elements that work in concert with each other and probably require a bit of fine tuning. Consider this hilarious comic from The Oatmeal that shows the painful outcome of too many minor changes. The more time spent on “minor changes”, the less the changes are fine-tuning and you are probably getting away from the core design of the site. The most successful projects I have completed have been done quickly with only a few changes.

To recap, avoid ‘design by committee’ at all costs. The end result should never (and will never) please everyone. Have one point of contact on your side to relay feedback to the designer. Rely on your designer, they should be able to justify their decisions and explain if your suggestions will not be effective (and why). While you might be inclined to get the opinions of your committee as support, it never works that way. Be clear on your goals from the beginning to avoid ruining your website.

(photo: Shutterstock)

Design by Committee will Ruin Your Website is a post from the law firm marketing blog, Lawyerist.com

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