Developing a website for your new law firm in Singapore is something that will take a lot of time and probably also a small annual investment to ensure its effectiveness and maintenance. While most lawyers or law firms rely on third parties to develop their online platforms, there are also entrepreneurs who prefer to do everything themselves, which sometimes just means more time, more frustration and more money.
In web design there is nothing written, everything is valid as long as it works. However, there is clear evidence that there are certain ways of doing things that end up working more than others, and that is what we will try to explain throughout this article. Next, we will explain to you the best tricks to make your web page with all the guarantees of success.
Ready?
Well let’s start!
Find out how much time you have
Designing a proper website is something that always takes more time than money, so if you are a lawyer with thousands of open cases and you spend your day away from home working, it is in your best interest to give this job to someone else.
A website that offers legal services does not only want an initial design, but a constant maintenance that ensures that the page has new content every month and that the messages of the clients are read and answered; something that a lawyer with a big agenda, will never be able to do by himself. It is then when you should hire the services of a professional in web design and management of all its contents, which may be an added expense, but that in the long run will make you earn much more.
Renounce perfection
If you are a prestigious lawyer, the most logical thing is that you want your website to be a site worth admiring too and that at first sight it will arouse the interest and admiration of everyone. Although, always demanding the maximum is something good that takes us to achieve many successes, for the development of websites and their management is not applicable.
The online market is constantly changing and what was fashionable today, tomorrow is no longer, so if your law firm has a standard website with no few exclusive features, so much the better; the more stable and solid it is, the less it will be altered by the passage of time and network updates.
Think about a marketing plan
Every company needs a marketing strategy, and in the case of a law firm that need is even greater. You may now have a stable client portfolio and not need to expand it, but over time your contacts will have to be renewed and for that the only thing worth using is some online advertising tool: social networks, google analytics, LinkedIn, etc.
It is a long term investment worth making, because the better your advertising is and the more reach it has, the more customers you will get.
DIY or a web design professional?
There are many lawyers who find themselves unable to delegate their affairs to other people, let alone professionals from another sector they hardly know, which leads them to design the website themselves, manage the content, marketing and everything else. And what is usually the result? A lot of work, a lot of money and few results.
In life it is important to know when to delegate, and the design and management of a professional website is one of those things that although we can do it ourselves, it is always better to be carried out by a true professional in the field who can dedicate all the time that is needed.
Choose the type of web developer
One of the first things we have to decide when we create our website is whether we are going to use a theme that we can develop through some visual builder, such as WordPress or Wix, or choose between much more rigid default templates and give us much less choice of customization.
If we have decided to create the website of our law firm in a totally autonomous way, perhaps the best thing we can do is to select some default template that will help us avoid editing errors and that will ensure a homogeneous aspect in all our publications.
Use popular content management systems
Today, almost anyone can have their own blog or online store with little or no knowledge of web design and programming. How is that possible? Well, thanks to the use of free online content management platforms such as WordPress or Wix.
These platforms provide us with everything we need to have a place in the online traffic and be well positioned in the SEO, while providing us with the possibility of acquiring a beautiful appearance and a wide range of tools for the creation of really simple content. Therefore, if we want to have a website for our office that is easy to manage, cheap and effective, using these CMS is our best option.
Do not use proprietary CMS
If you are a beginner in website creation, you may fall into the trap of giving all the management rights of your website to a CMS (especially those specific to legal marketing), which do not allow you to customize the site to your liking and make you pay too high a fee that does not compensate for their work.
The advice we give you is that when you choose your CMS you should be very aware of your possibilities in this sector, that is, if your budget is limited and your website should be personal and simple, the best thing you can do is to resort to flexible and free CMS that do not tie you permanently to any contract.
Design your website according to your capabilities
Do you know the phrase “With great power comes great responsibility”? Well, something similar happens in the creation and management of professional websites. If your skills in web design are limited and your budget to pay a third party is not very high either, it is convenient that your expectations about the website go according to these limitations.
Otherwise, you could find yourself facing the difficulty of having to manage a website that is too complex and difficult to maintain over time by yourself; be true to yourself and everything will be easier.
Distinguish between free and premium
When deciding on the type of service you are going to hire for the management and design of your website, it is worth reading carefully the conditions offered by the free and the paid package, because depending on your professional needs it might be more profitable to invest a few dollars that will provide you with greater flexibility and efficiency in the long term.
The free plans usually offered by platforms such as WordPress are aimed at people who are going to manage a blog or a simple content page, but not for a professional law firm with a portfolio of prestigious clients; the best always demands the best, remember that.
Analyze your SEO
If you already have a professional website with a very good and constant SEO reach, you may have to rethink the possibility of submitting the whole page to a deep restructuring, since such a change could negatively influence the SEO and start to make you lose customers.
Be inspired by law firms similar to yours
If you need inspiration for the design of your new website, the best thing you can do is look at the design of other law firms’ websites similar to yours, as this way you will have a much more realistic idea of what you need and what might work.
Through these 10 simple tips that we have explained to you, the design of your law firm’s new website will be much easier and will have much more possibilities to work. Don’t hesitate to put them into practice!