Morgul Marketing

    A family law site that proves the county, the fee and the next step

    A family law website is a triage tool wearing the clothes of a brochure. The person arriving is usually alone, usually on a phone, often at an hour when nobody is at your desk, and they are deciding in a few seconds whether they are in the right place. The site has to answer that, make one small next step possible, and collect only what intake will act on tomorrow morning. Everything else is decoration. In a metro where Davidson County and the four counties around it operate differently, the right place question is also a geography question, and most firm sites answer it last.

    Talk to us

    Your homepage is probably not the page most people land on

    Open the landing page report before you redesign anything, because the entry point decides what has to be on the page.

    Organic and paid traffic in this category lands on matter pages, county pages, attorney bios and the fee page far more often than the homepage. If those pages assume the visitor already read the homepage, the visitor is missing the context that would make them call.

    So every significant page needs the essentials on it: what you handle, where you appear, what the first meeting involves, and how to reach a human. Not buried in the footer.

    Bios do heavy work here. Someone deciding whether to hand over the worst year of their life wants to look at a face and read a paragraph that sounds like a person.

    Build navigation around what a stranger is looking for rather than around your practice group chart. Divorce, custody, support, modification, and where you file.

    The visitor comparing three firms gives your page about a breath

    Speed is not a technical vanity metric on a site where the visitor has two other tabs open.

    Most of the weight on a slow legal site comes from a handful of avoidable things: a full width background video, uncompressed photography, four fonts, a chat widget, and a stack of tracking scripts loaded before the content.

    Test on a phone over cellular, not on office wifi with a fresh cache. The experience that matters is a mid range phone somewhere in Donelson with two bars.

    Fix the largest element first. The headline, the phone number and the primary button should be readable and tappable before anything decorative has finished loading.

    Every third party script is a trade. Ask what each one earns you, and remove the ones that exist because a vendor suggested them.

    Three questions on the form, and a fourth only if somebody will act on it

    An inquiry form for family law is a routing device, not an intake interview, and every extra field costs you people who were ready to talk.

    Ask for a name, a way to reach them, and which county each household is in. Add matter type if it changes who picks up the file. Stop there.

    One field earns its place beyond that: how you may safely reply. Whether email is shared, whether it is safe to leave a voicemail, whether a text is better. It is a small question that prevents a serious problem.

    Do not ask for the other party's name in a public form field if your process cannot handle what arrives. Conflict screening needs a real workflow behind it.

    Treat everything submitted as sensitive from the moment it is sent. Where it is stored, who receives it, and how long it is kept are questions worth confirming with your own counsel.

    What your site stores about a visitor can surface later in a case

    Analytics, chat transcripts, session recording and remarketing pixels all create records about people in the middle of a contested matter.

    Session recording tools capture what people type, sometimes including text they deleted before submitting. On a divorce site that is a category of data most firms would rather not hold.

    Chat transcripts are records too. If a widget stores conversations with a third party vendor, know where those live and how long they are kept.

    Add a plain note that browsing can be visible to others on a shared device, and a fast way to leave the page. Small, unglamorous, and occasionally important.

    None of the above is legal advice about your obligations. Data handling and confidentiality duties are worth confirming with your own counsel and with the state bar before you settle on a stack.

    A Franklin page and a Murfreesboro page cannot be one page with the name swapped

    Metro Nashville and Davidson County are consolidated, the surrounding counties are not, and a serious site shows that it knows the difference.

    A visitor in Hendersonville or Mount Juliet wants to know where they would file, where you would appear, and what the drive to a meeting looks like. A page that only changes the town name in the headline answers none of that.

    Write about the courthouse, the general shape of local practice, and how you work with clients who cannot easily get downtown during business hours. Say that practice and requirements differ by county and are worth confirming locally.

    Offer video meetings prominently. Someone in Murfreesboro weighing an hour of driving against an evening at home will choose the option you make easiest to book.

    Only publish the county pages you can keep accurate. Three real ones beat a dozen thin ones, and thin location pages are a pattern search engines have been discounting for a long time.

    Photographs of your own office beat the stock conference room every time

    Every competing site uses the same gavel, the same skyline and the same stock handshake, which is why none of them are believed.

    Hire a photographer for a morning. Your actual attorneys, your actual reception area, the street outside whether it is in Green Hills or Germantown. The pictures do not need to be beautiful, they need to be real.

    Skyline photography of Broadway says nothing about you. A picture of the room where the meeting will happen answers a question the visitor is asking.

    Keep image files sized correctly and served in a modern format. Photography is usually the heaviest thing on a legal site and the easiest thing to fix.

    Write captions that carry information. Names, roles, and where each attorney appears. Captions get read when body copy does not.

    Questions we get

    How much should a family law firm website cost?
    It depends far more on content than on build. The expensive part is the writing: matter pages, county pages, a fee explanation and attorney bios that sound like people. A cheap template filled with vendor boilerplate costs less and performs accordingly. Budget for the words first and the design second.
    Should we put pricing on the site?
    Put the shape of it on the site. What a consultation costs and how long it lasts, how retainers work, what makes a matter more expensive. You cannot quote a case without facts and should say so, but the firm that explains its billing gets calls from people who were otherwise too anxious to ask.
    Do we need a live chat widget?
    Only if a trained person is behind it. An unstaffed chatbot on a divorce site collects sensitive statements and answers nothing, and the transcripts become records held by a third party. If nobody can answer within a minute or two, a clear phone number and a short form serve the visitor better.
    How many location pages should we build?
    As many as you can keep accurate, and no more. If you appear regularly in Davidson, Williamson and Rutherford, write three real pages about those courthouses and how you work there. Adding Sumner and Wilson pages you cannot support does more harm than leaving them out.
    What is the single most common mistake on family law websites?
    Leading with the firm's history instead of the visitor's situation. The person reading is frightened and in a hurry. Tell them what you handle, where you handle it, what the first meeting costs and how to take one step, then tell them about the firm.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

    Talk to us about web design for family law firms in Nashville

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