Does Your Law Firm’s Website Pass the User Experience Test?

Before the pandemic, law firms used to spend a big portion of their marketing budget making sure that visiting the law office would be a pleasant experience for current and prospective clients. They hired interior decorators and spared no expense on comfortable chairs, elegant doors that opened and closed quietly, and even sometimes in fancy flourishes like water features and aquariums. In other words, they gave importance to the in-person user experience.

For the foreseeable future, most of your chances to make a good impression on prospective clients will come through your website.

Annoying Design Features Are a Deal Breaker

In 2021, even though people might have time to make sourdough bread from scratch, no one has time for glitchy websites. If your website loads too slowly, if images don’t display, or if it does not format properly on tablets and mobile devices, visitors will not stick around, even if your site is the first organic search result. Likewise, drop down menus that disappear without warning or do not allow users to scroll all the way down to the item they want will also try visitors’ patience. If your site doesn’t meet these minimum standards of user friendliness, prospective clients will move on even before they get a chance to read your authoritative content.

Looks Aren’t Everything, But …

The good news is that getting a drop-dead gorgeous homepage for your law firm costs a lot less than making your physical office space look that good. Even if the content pages have a rather plain design, it is worthwhile to invest in the first image that visitors see when they navigate to your site through a Google search. As an experiment, click on your competitors’ websites and only look at what you see “above the fold,” in other words the content that appears when you first arrive at the site, before you click or scroll. Focus on making the “above the fold” portion of your website look better than theirs.

The Role of Content

A devastatingly beautiful homepage makes a good first impression, but by itself, it is not enough to persuade prospective clients to contact you. To achieve that, you must show your knowledge and communicate it clearly. Your website should contain content that directly addresses visitors’ questions about your practice area. Ideally, that content should include videos of varying lengths, as well as a regularly updated blog.

Now About That Blog

Even if your website is a knockout beauty and eminently easy to navigate, it will quickly slight farther down the list of Google search results unless you regularly update your blog. Choose the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to keep your blog up to date with engaging, fact-checked content that casual readers and prospective clients alike will want to read.