Law Firm Homepage Design

Patterns are used in all sorts of industries as a short cut to delivering best practice. In the same way that lawyers have a bank of precedents, and boiler-plate clauses to draw upon, good web designers have patterns they use as a jumping off point for tackling a specific client’s brief.

In this newsletter, I’m going to share with you the four common patterns used on law firm homepages. I’ll show you a sketch layout to help identify each one, and I’ll give a brief description of the advantages and disadvantages to help you assess the suitability of your own firm’s homepage.

Patterns can save a huge amount of time, and allow us to focus on the issues specific to each client, but they are never a substitute for experience. Like many rules in life, the real skill is in knowing when to break them.

1. The Big Splash

The big splash is full of impact and is characterised by the use of a full-width, iconic image that occupies more than one third of the vertical height of the space above the crease. (The crease being an imaginary line above which content will fit on the screen without scrolling).

The Big Splash might look like this:

The big splash has the ability to provoke an instant emotional response. For this reason is commonly used by firms who aim to distinguish themselves in the market based on personality (in my view, a fairly weak position).

Stronger differentiators, such as geographic specialism and industry expertise, can also be communicated well using this model. Success lies in the sophisticated selection of imagery.

2. The Information Portal

The information portal gets large quantities of information up front on the homepage. Information is usually organised into columns, and font weights and image size are employed to establish the relative importance of different categories of content.

The Information Portal might look like this:

Demonstrating breadth and expertise concurrently can be a big challenge, particularly for the very biggest firms. The information portal model helps to solve this problem by putting huge amounts of content up front.

It is not uncommon to find more than one hundred links, which take readers deep into the site site. Because of this, care should be taken when designing the site more generally, to ensure it is easy to navigate. Readers should never be taken deep in to your site without providing an easy way for them to get back or move around within the chosen content area.

3. The Fork in the Road

While many firms still have a lot of work to do when it comes to communicating a unique proposition, many are at least categorising their content according to basic reader types. If you are a small firm, this normally takes the form of two options given equal weight: ‘business, or individual’. In larger practices we’d expect to see separation by by narrower categories such as practice area or industry sector.

The fork in the road might look like this:

This approach is a smart move provided you reward readers with content that is actually tailored to their preference. Content that is focused on a particular type of reader is always more effective than general content aimed at a wide audience.

If you chose this model, do make sure you collect statistics on which link your readers click on. You might find that your practice is more biased to one category than you initially thought.

4. The Personal Touch

If you’re a law firm that believes the people are the product, then you could do a lot worse than the personal touch. This model is characterised by professional portraits or ‘lifestyle’ imagery of fee-earners in action, combined with a first-person narrative and direct quotations.

The Personal Touch might look like this:

This model is a really smart way to connect with readers on a personal level. If you use photography that makes direct eye contact with the camera, the effect is magnified. Because of this, you must make sure that your firm can deliver the exceptional levels of service that readers will come to expect.

Choosing a layout for your homepage is one of the most important decisions you will have to make as your design your law firm’s website. Which approach is best suited to you need will depend of a huge range of factors, not least the wider positioning and strategy your firm has adopted.

Finally, these models don’t have to be used alone. The days when scrolling was frowned upon are pretty much over. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a Big Splash above an Information Portal, or a Fork in the Road laid over The Personal Touch. Experiment and have fun!