Our Website Design Process

At The Modern Firm, we work exclusively with small law firms and solo attorneys. Over the course of nearly 2000 website projects, we’ve learned a few things about what our clients need when it comes to branding, website design, and marketing services. 

We understand that lawyers at small law firms are busy working for their clients. You don’t have time to become de facto designers or tech experts just to get a website that works for your practice. We keep things straightforward and practical, encouraging your input where it matters without bogging you down with unnecessary decisions.

Featured Website Launches

Karen S. Gerstner & Associates, P.C.

National Logistics Mediations

Zammitti Shaw & Breen

Sumner Immigration Law, PLLC

Law Offices of Jackie L. Russell, PLLC

Cermak & Inglin, LLP

The Law Office of Poorvi B. Parkhie

Bloom Family Law, PC

Mitch Foster Law

The Van Dora Law Firm, LLC

View Our Website Design Portfolio

Learning About Your Firm and Website Goals

This is where our relationship starts: a Zoom meeting or phone call with our team so that we can begin to learn about your law firm, past website experiences, and future goals. This gives us the opportunity to introduce you to our company and what services we offer to help you meet these goals. 

Within a few days following this initial meeting we will send a detailed proposal, so you can make an informed decision about moving forward. If at all it becomes apparent during this introductory process that our agency does not align with your needs, we will be up front about that and point you in the right direction. 

Building a Strong Foundation for Your Brand 

Your law firm’s website is the most important platform for connecting with the people you want to help. So, naturally, one of the first steps in our website design process involves getting to know your firm. We’re not trying to create a generic website—we’re creating one that makes your firm stand out.

Tone and Messaging

One of the first things we’ll do is schedule a 90-minute Zoom intake interview to take a deeper dive into your firm’s story, practice areas, clients, strengths, challenges, and your goals for the new website. This call is one of the few steps in our onboarding process and usually takes place within a few weeks after you sign on to work with our team.

Getting to know what makes your firm unique helps us create a website with the tone and messaging that resonates with your preferred clients. Within a week after this kickoff call, we’ll produce a comprehensive brand platform document that serves as a touchstone for our team, and yours, throughout the website design process and beyond.

Creating the Visual Representation for Your Firm

Once we have a deeper sense of your law firm’s identity, brand, and what you want your website to achieve, we can get to work on transforming that into what people will experience when they come to your website.

Visual Branding

Your visual brand is the set of cues that helps people recognize on sight that they are dealing with your unique law firm; it’s a visual expression of what your firm is about. Your logo is the most essential part of your visual brand and sets the tone for your website and marketing materials. We will incorporate your existing logo into your new website design, if you have one that you love. But if you need one, we’ll help you create a logo so that it can serve as a consistent visual anchor for your firm. 

Design Preferences

You will have the opportunity to share design preferences and inspirations by completing our design intake form. We’ll also help you assemble important assets like photography, videos and other media that will be used on your website.

Depending on the specific law firm website design service you’ve selected, our team may begin the creative process right away. But, if you are embarking on a custom website design you will also have a 90-minute design intake meeting with us to be guided through a world of fonts, colors, imagery, layouts and customizations for your site.

Website Design

Just like a traditional architect lays out blueprints for a new house, our Creative Director will take all of your design preferences and turn them into a blueprint for the website. He will construct thoughtful art direction for our team to bring your vision to life and we’ll have an internal review to ensure your vision is coming to fruition. This process usually takes two to four weeks depending on your specific project type and the design elements needed to be incorporated. 

Once your first design mockups are ready, we will present them to you alongside an impactful video discussing each key feature and elements we’ve considered. At this stage we begin our collaborative review process together to make any adjustments to your design until it is exactly what you want before heading to development. 

Contact Us To Get Started

Managing Your Law Firm Website Content

Whether you are embarking on a website design journey for the very first time or your site has had numerous iterations over the years, the content for each page can feel overwhelming. That is why we will handle content drafting, migration, and optimization for you while our design team is working their magic on the visuals.

Drafting

Whether we’re drafting your website content for you or reviewing content provided by your firm, we will assign an attorney-writer to your project. Our goal is that the final content aligns with your firm’s personality, tone, messaging, audience and marketing initiatives.

You can expect our writing services to be a collaborative process, and your feedback is incredibly valuable. We want everyone to be happy with the result, and revisions are sometimes a part of the process. Our writers are never offended by requests for changes; they depend on your honest feedback to bring your unique voice to the content.

Migration

When we are redesigning a website for a law firm that has an existing site, it often makes sense to migrate most, if not all, of your existing content rather than writing new content from scratch. This is especially true if the existing website has positive rankings in search engines that need to be preserved, or a large volume of relevant content like resource libraries or years of blog posts that would be difficult to recreate.

Creating a seamless migration plan is baked into our process, allowing us to pull content from any existing website, even from difficult proprietary systems from legacy providers like FindLaw, Scorpion, LawLytics and more.

Optimization

It’s become increasingly clear that optimizing website content lays a solid foundation for later marketing efforts—even if you don’t immediately plan to embark on a marketing program. If generating leads through your law firm website is important to you, our Kickstart Optimization program sets you up for the greatest chance of success. 

When you add this option onto your website package, our Marketing Director is involved in your project from the outset, working with our writers to ensure your content is optimized for the keywords you are targeting.

Developing Your Fully-Functional Website

Once your website design is finalized and you’ve signed off on it, we move it to the development stage. This is the process of taking the design and transforming it into a working, responsive, mobile-friendly, and easy to edit website. ‌

This process takes about three to four weeks, during which we code the site, populate it with your content, and review it for accuracy. 

Quality Assurance and Collaborative Review—Every Step of the Way

Freshly-coded websites are almost ready to make their public debut—but not quite. Our team will present you with your newly coded website at a private URL, to allow for our next collaborative review process before making the website live.

At this stage of the process, we can make tweaks to the text and photos as well as minor adjustments to the design. If there are requests for major design changes at this point, like changing the color scheme, layout, or structure of the site, there’s likely to be an extra charge and a delay of launch. That’s why we value your input in the design phase and throughout the process—so you won’t get any unwanted surprises as we near the end.