Get More Legal Clients With A Better Website

While offline promotion still has its place, the first place most people go today to find anything they need is the internet. If you don’t have a website, and beyond that, an online presence, you are going to miss out on most of your market.

And while there are ways to create an online presence apart from your website, most of them rely on a 3rd party platform, which puts you at risk. A website, on the other hand, is yours. It’s a defined piece of online real estate that you can build your business on, without worrying about how other business or platforms might impact your reach or message. You have full control and ownership.

If you want to compete for business online, you need a website. And what that really means in this day and age is that if you want more clients for your law firm, you need a website.

A website domain (the name you type into the browser) can cost anywhere from $1 per year up to thousands annually depending on the extension used (.com, .net, etc.) and the name itself. Many domain names are already taken and could cost an arm and a leg to purchase from the owner.

This doesn’t mean every domain name is going to break your bank; it just means you might have to get a little creative with your website URL if you want to go for cheaper options. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however; an original website URL could actually result in better name retention and make for easier recall. Of course, you could always go for more common domain names, but either way, you will have to pay annually for your domain. Some services will allow you to pay for multiple years in advance as well.

Be wary when purchasing from domain name selling services as they are prone to adding on additional services and trying to nickel and dime you. Make sure you take your time and carefully read over each step of the process in order to avoid any unexpected fees. Many services will also offer reduced rates for the first year and then drastically jack up the costs once the contract has been renewed. Keep an eye out for all the details of the agreement and make sure you aren’t setting yourself up for disaster. Do your due diligence before diving into a contract with some cut-rate service and make sure they don’t have a history of shady dealings by checking out customer reviews and message boards prior to signing.

Alternatively, if you work with us, we’ll take care of most of this for you and advise you directly in the areas where we can’t do it for you. Even if you aren’t currently working with us, we are more than happy to offer advice if you want to reach out.

The cost of web design can vary greatly depending on numerous factors such as the quality level, the number of pages, the expertise needed for proper search engine optimization, and any additional optimizations that would be helpful to drive traffic and convert those who visit the site.

Custom page design, while a bit pricey, can really help to make your site stand out from the competition and help you see a higher return on investment. Templates can be used for standard pages within your site which can save money at the expense of originality, but a custom landing page can really help your business leave a lasting impression.

A high-quality design will take time and money, but the fruits of the efforts will be much greater than those of a lesser quality website. In addition to the graphics, the performance of the site itself and its optimization for search engines will have a marked improvement on its placement within search engine rankings. Having content that is engaging and properly optimized will boost your site’s traffic and lead to more prospects and conversions, but this work isn’t accomplished overnight either.

Pre-templated web pages are an affordable option but will result in less traffic and functionality compared to professionally-designed custom pages. While a high-end website can be quite costly, a well-honed site will notice much larger increases in traffic from that of a poorly optimized and visually displeasing one. Beautiful, functional sites see greater returns on investment for your business for years to come due to the quality content and accessibility that they provide to your audience.

The websites that we build are custom to your law firm’s brand, utilize the highest quality content, are optimized to load quickly over a mobile network, mobile phone optimized, optimized for search engine ranking, ADA compliant (digital certificate included), and if that wasn't enough - your website will be have a conversion rate optimization campaign ran on it prior to launch. The cost for all of this starts at $10,000 and the timeline begins at 90 days.

Hosting Costs

Website hosts (services that provide the servers your site and its content live on) can also have drastically varying monthly prices depending on various factors such as the specific services they provide in addition to the hosting such as the amount of traffic your site can support and the reliability of the host. Your monthly cost can vary between a few dollars per month up to several hundred based on these variables.

A cheaper service will be fine for a small business whose site doesn’t see hundreds or thousands of visitors hourly, but if you run a global company that has constant traffic, you’re going to need dedicated servers. Hosting services typically offer these different types of servers:

We typically recommend starting with a Cloud VPS solution due to the speed and reliability.

Shared Servers

Shared hosting means your site will be placed on a server along with hundreds or even thousands of other sites that will all share the space and resources with each other. This is the cheapest option (starting as low as $3.95/month) that can serve your smaller business well, but traffic limitations can create slow load times and have poor scalability and security.

Now, there are some great managed WordPress hosting companies where the websites are hosted on shared servers. These hosting companies have their servers specifically "tuned" for hosting sites that use the WordPress platform where load times and security are less of a concern. These services typically cost around $40 to $75 per month. They offer a great starting point for most local businesses in the legal and medical industries.

Cloud VPS

Virtual Private Server hosting is similar to Shared hosting because your site will share a server with other sites, but there will be fewer sites on the server and they are partitioned separately from each other. This means your site will have more dedicated resources as a baseline and will have some scalability for times of traffic spiking. These servers are still affordable (in the $50-$130 range per month) but allow for increased traffic and provide more reliability.

Cloud Servers

Cloud hosting utilizes a network of servers that all act together as a single system. This means your site is hosted on numerous servers which allows for immense scalability and reliability. If a server on the network goes down, the other servers can pick up the slack and prevent loss of service. Pricing is typically charged on a usage basis with a flat starting rate in the $30 range.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated hosting places your site on its very own server separate from anyone else’s site. This allows for greater customization and security as well as high performance up to a certain point. A dedicated server will provide the highest speeds but has a hard limit to its scalability. Dedicated servers range in the $80-$500 per month range based on the services provided by the host and the specifications you require.