Legal web design mistakes may not appear, at first, to be obvious. However, you need to review your website’s design if you notice more people are leaving rather than visiting your site. If a site is well-designed, you’ll gain more clients and continue to generate leads. Therefore, your legal website should be as simple to navigate as it is easy to find products in a well-ordered store.
Legal Web Design Mistakes: How to Avoid Them
Web designers in the know understand the importance of coding, have the needed technological knowledge to provide back-end and front-end services and possess a great deal of experience in building sites.
They know what will work and won’t work, especially when it comes to legal web design. Therefore, use the following tips to give you further insight on what to avoid when designing and developing a site.
1. Problems with Coding and Organization
One of the worst design mistakes to make is to add content faster than your site’s technical updates. This can wreak technical and structural havoc, which can lead to a complete overhaul of the site’s design. When it comes to making web design mistakes, this is an error that can really impact you from both a marketing and financial standpoint.
What to Ask
To make sure your site is coded correctly and organized properly, you need to answer some key questions.
- Are the visual elements easy to see and read? In other words, do they stand out?
- Is the content simple to find and organized by category. How difficult is it to locate specific topics?
- Does the site convey the right message to clients?
- When you look at the site, does everything look tidy and neat? Does it look alright?
- Are there any distractions? If so, what are they?
All the above questions are important to answer, especially if you wish to generate leads and reach out to people online. If your website is not well organized, you’ll defeat the purpose of having a site.
2. An Non-Responsive, Non-Mobile Design
You cannot make mobile-friendliness for your web design an option. It’s a necessity. According to Pew Research, about 85% of the population in the U.S. owns a smartphone, and three-quarters of the population work on a PC, laptop, or tablet.
Therefore, more people own smartphones than other electronics. Also, about 15% of respondents said they were smartphone-dependent, which means they use their smartphone totally instead of a landline connection.
Google also penalizes websites that are not responsive or mobile-friendly. The sites should feature elements that are scaled to a specific screen’s resolution (a responsive design) so viewers can view the site with ease.
Smashing Magazine further explains that a responsive design is a method that responds to the behavior of the user and the computer environment, based on orientation, screen size, and system. It includes custom features for the user of a laptop as well as for the user who regularly uses a smartphone. If you’re designing a website, you need to take care of all your customers – PC users and smartphone users alike.
3. Poorly Designed Contact Forms
Add your contact form to your website on the home page. This will keep your visitors from trying to scout around for the form. Also, don’t make the mistake of making the contact form too long or detailed. Shorter and simpler is much better.
You don’t need to take your visitor’s entire life story. You can leave longer inquiries for client calls. Include places for the name and contact details and a short space for the reason for the call.
Also, don’t leave out the opt-in form on your blog page. This form is designed purely for generating leads and building an email list. Use this form inside your blog posts. Unlike a contact form, these forms do not require the contact name, address, and email. You only have to add a space for the name and email.
4. Overused or Dated Stock Photos on the Home Page
Another one of the legal design mistakes you don’t want to overlook is using dated or overused stock photos – especially on the home page. A client visiting your legal website wants to know more about your firm and its attorneys. Therefore, it’s important for them to see these details.
To add photos to your homepage, you might consider scheduling a photoshoot at your office, taking pictures of the paralegals and attorneys in your firm. Add images of your building and city, reception area, and library. Doing so will help clients feel more comfortable as it makes your site look more inviting.
5. Slower-than-Normal Load Times
If your website loads slowly, you have some design flaws. In most instances, legal websites do not receive so much traffic that the servers can’t handle it. For instance, an affordable web hosting plan usually can accommodate about 10,000 visitors per month. Therefore, if your site loads slowly, you have to look at its design.
If the design looks too complicated or features a mix of too many videos, photos, or other large files, it will slow down the pace of your website and lead to problems with navigation. For each second it takes your legal site to load, you also increase the bounce rate.
6. Getting Too Creative
Sometimes, you need to follow best practices when you’re creating a web design. For example, you don’t want to get so creative that your site is difficult to navigate. Most visitors expect to see the menu bar at the top of the website and expect that clicking on the logo will direct them back home.
Making a change from what people normally anticipate can lead to communication or navigational difficulties.
Avoid Legal Web Design Mistakes – Who to Call in LA
Are you concerned about your website’s design? Is your bounce rate higher than normal? Maybe you’re a lawyer who wants to build a new site and avoid the above legal web mistakes. If so, you only need to call one marketing agency. Contact AtttorneyMarketing.Online now at (888) 992-9529 or (323) 433-6529.
