Law Practice Matters

I don't think it is wildly controversial to say that if you are in private law practice in 2009 you need a web presence. More to the point, you need to cultivate a web presence. That presence does not need to rival the Sistine Chapel for beauty, but it does need to be professional-looking enough to not scare away potential clients.

(In point of fact, you probably already have a web presence. Google your name and see what comes up. If you're not happy with the results, check out the recent article I wrote on Free and Easy Search Engine Visibility for Lawyers.)

There was a time when a law firm could afford not to have a web presence, but that time has passed. Google is the way potential clients research your firm, find your contact information, and locate directions to your office. To be invisible (or embarrassingly unprofessional) on a Google search undermines your credibility and ultimately makes it harder for you to find and keep a desirable client base. (Desirable, in this case, meaning "willing and able to pay your bills and unlikely to drive you totally insane.")

I know the minute I say you need a professional-looking website the image that flashes in your head is a taxi meter spinning wildly with the costs of hiring and using professional web developers. It doesn't have to be that way, though. There are lots of resources available to build an inexpensive but professional-looking site that does not require Bill Gates-esque coding skills or more hours than you put in trying to figure out what happened in the latest Lost episode. (Seriously, Lost, wrap up a story line once in a while before you start yet another new infuriating Dharma riddle.)

Here are my top 3:

1. Do It Yourself Using SquareSpace

My tool of choice, and the one that I use for this blog, is SquareSpace. SquareSpace is a combination hosting service and website building/blogging tool. It breaks everything down into drag and drop modules, so putting together your website is a little like building a Lego tower - but not nearly as bad as this Lego tower. I put this blog together in a couple of hours and I tweak it (in addition to writing the content) once every few weeks for a few minutes. That's it. My wife writes a baking blog using SquareSpace and she had it up and running in about the same amount of time.

Now, before you write this off and conclude that I am some inveterate do-it-yourselfer, believe me when I tell you nothing could be farther from the truth. My wife likes to say that I fix all the problems around our ramshackle mid-century modern home using only two tools: a checkbook and a cell phone. She's mean sometimes.

This is the third iteration of Law Practice Matters, by the way. It began life as a free, hosted blog on Wordpress.com and then morphed into a professionally designed website, to the tune of about $5,000. I moved it to SquareSpace a couple of months ago and I now pay $14 per month for their "Pro" account, though the prices go as little as $8 per month to start. I do all of the writing and design/building (which really overstates it - think legos) of the site myself. Nobody is likely to confuse it with a site designed by a highly-skilled web-designer, but it looks professional enough that it doesn't alienate my core audience of solo and small firm lawyers.

I had a great conversation with Lee Rosen, the blogger behind Divorce Discourse, on this topic that we recorded in the podcast, Building a Website for Under $1,000. If you have a few minutes, give it a listen.

2. Host Your Own Wordpress Blog

Wordpress is an open source blogging software that makes it cheap and relatively easy to build and host your own blog. All you need are a domain and a hosting account. I use GoDaddy for the former and used to use BlueHost for the latter, before I moved to SquareSpace. Oh, and while there are free themes (themes are essentially add-ons to the Wordpress software that change the way your website/blog looks) available, you'll make your life much easier if you purchase a theme like Thesis, which is widely regarded as one of the best ones available. Divorce Discourse is built using Thesis on a hosted Wordpress theme.

The upside of this approach is that it is extremely cost effective and very nearly infinitely customizable. The downside is that - in order to make your site look good - it requires a little more willingness to get your hands dirty under the hood of your website. Not serious coding work but more, say, than I'm interested in putting in.

The Inspired Solo ran a good article titled The High Cost of "Pretty": Why You Don't Need a $2,500 Blog Design. I agree with her assessment (which is basically that the web design industry promotes the inaccurate idea that your website needs to be beautiful) and she also has built her own site. It's worth checking out.

She is clear though, that she learned how to do some basic coding to make her site look good and add in some of the functionality that it has. I think that is wonderful, and I experimented with Thesis for a while, but it just required a little more from me than I was willing to give. Basically, the more I have to learn acronyms like CSS and HTML the more it feels like I have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

If, however, you are into playing around with your website and tweaking it to get it to look the way you want, I have no reservations at all about this method of building a site.

3. If You Must Hire Someone, Hire Smart

Some lawyers just can't bear the thought of even the small amount of effort required to make a SquareSpace site look good, and Wordpress seems even more difficult. For them, there is no palatable alternative to hiring someone to build their website. If this sounds like you, then at least be smart in the way you hire a web designer.

(Personal cautionary tale about to ensue.)

When I built my expensive website, I had a bias for going to a local web designer. I chose a designer in my hometown, and he and his firm did a really great job. My website was beautiful - it still gets all kinds of accolades in the web design community and I routinely get people asking to buy the theme from me even years later - but it cost a fortune at a time when I had to watch every penny. I was starting a solo law practice management consulting company and I hated to spend that kind of dough on a website, but I just didn't know what else to do.

If I were hiring a designer over again, I would probably forego going local (as much as I value buying local to support sustainable agriculture) and instead would use an auction site like Elance. Elance is a bit like eBay, but instead of bidding on products, you bid on services provided by freelance professionals, like web designers. You post a job that you want done and the global freelancers who sell their work on Elance bid on the right to do your project. You can see their portfolios, what kind of feedback they have received from other customers, and their average hourly rate. It drives down the cost of the services (you will be blown away by the low cost of some of the bids that come in from around the world!) and opens the talent pool literally to the entire planet. I'd guess that you could get a professionally-designed website that looks good for a few hundred dollars.

So, there you have it. 3 ways to create an inexpensive and professional-looking law firm website.

Take a deep breath. The meter just stopped running.