Posted by Yodle

Outside of a great education and years of experience, one of the most crucial parts of successfully running a law firm or practice is having a great website that represents your law firm. In many cases, your website will be the first way that potential clients connect with you, and your first opportunity to convert leads into long time clients. However, with so many options available for creating an effective site, it can be hard to locate the one that’s right for you. Instead of taking time away from your clients so that you can research website building options, we’ve done the legwork for you.

Basically, there are four different ways you can go about creating your website:

Do it yourself: Unless you are an expert at web design and you have plenty of time to spare, this approach is not recommended. For most law firms, the time it would take to learn about designing a site and actually executing the plan would be far too time consuming.

DIY, Using a template: This option still puts a lot of the work in your hands, such as updating content and hosting the site, but it allows business owners to create their websites based on predesigned templates. Most online companies that offer templates have large portfolios with various designs for you to choose from based on your price point and the quality of the website you are looking for. For basic, lower-cost templates check out vendors such as Template Monster (http://www.templatemonster.com) and Homestead (http://www.homestead.com). However, if you are looking for a higher quality site that will be more customizable, then you may want to research offers provided by dzine it (http://www.dzineit.net) among others.



Having a site built for you, using a template: There are plenty of companies who specialize in creating websites based on approved templates. By choosing this option, you will have secured a reliable, expertly crafted site for your company, while ongoing content updates and hosting is managed by the company you hire. This option is a great way to balance cost against getting a quality site that reflects your practice well, and is one of the options that we here at Yodle offer our own clients.

Having a custom website built for you: This option is very similar to the previous one, except instead of building you a site based on a template, the site is built entirely from scratch. While there can be benefits to this strategy (especially if your practice has some very unique needs that should be reflected in the design of your site), this option is undoubtedly the most costly. Ultimately it will be up to your practice to best what fits your specific budgetary and design needs.

Now that you know about the different options in hand to create a website for your law firm, in future posts we will talk about ways to make your site more engaging, and how to leverage it to get more clients and grow your firm.