Write the first screen for someone who is reading badly because they are upset
People do not arrive at a divorce website calm, curious and well rested, and design that assumes otherwise loses them before the fold.
Attention here is short and shallow. Readers scan for confirmation that they are in the right place, and if the first screen offers a mission statement instead, they leave and open the next tab.
Three things belong above the fold: what kind of matters you handle, where you handle them, and what happens next. Where you handle them means naming the City of St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles County and whether you act on the Illinois side, because a reader in the Metro East needs that answer immediately and a reader in Florissant needs it almost as fast.
Cut the Latin and the throat-clearing. Short lines, ordinary nouns, one idea per sentence. Bar advertising rules also limit what a site may claim about outcomes, so keep the language factual and run the final copy past your own counsel.
A decent test: read your homepage aloud. Anything you would not say to a person sitting across from you in that state of mind comes out.
Your menu says dissolution and your client typed divorce
Legal vocabulary in navigation costs you clicks from the exact people who need you.
Firms label sections with the words used in filings. Clients use the words used in kitchens. Someone looking for help with a custody schedule is not searching for the formal term, and a menu built on formal terms makes them work to find their own problem.
Label the navigation with the client's word and teach the legal term inside the page, where you have room to explain it properly. You lose nothing and the page becomes more useful.
Break the family law bucket apart while you are in there. Divorce, custody and parenting time, child support, modifications, orders of protection, guardianship. Each is a different person with a different urgency, and one combined page serves the least urgent of them.
The same change helps search, because the words your clients use are the words they type.
Both parents' addresses belong in the form, because two of them can sit in two states
For this trade the inquiry form is a routing tool and a conflict check, not an intake interview.
One parent in Florissant and the other in Belleville is an ordinary arrangement here. So is one in the city and one in St. Charles County. Where each person lives shapes the entire first conversation, and asking on the form saves the call from starting cold.
Capture the short list: matter type, roughly where each parent lives, whether an order already exists and where it was entered, a safe way to reply, and when they can talk. Nothing else needs to be on the form.
Anything an intake person can ask on the phone should not be on the form. Household details like whose name the mortgage or the Ameren account sits in matter enormously later and belong in a conversation, not in a text box on a phone at midnight.
Keep the field count low on mobile and let the confirmation step carry the rest. Every additional field on a small screen is a chance for someone to decide they will do it tomorrow.
Three tracking scripts weigh more than every photograph on the site
Slow legal websites are usually slow because of what was bolted on after launch, not because of the images.
Tag managers, chat widgets, heat mapping, five font weights, a page builder loading modules the page never uses. Each one arrived for a reason nobody remembers, and together they decide how the site performs on cell service.
Inventory them. For each script, name what it does, who reads its output and whether anyone acted on that output in the last six months. Most sites can drop half.
Fewer third parties is also the safer position on a divorce website, where the data passing through a form is sensitive by definition. Speed and restraint happen to be the same decision here.
Measure the result on a mid-range phone on a cellular connection, not on the office network. Office wifi has never lost anybody an inquiry.
Grandparents raising a grandchild read your site, and not on a phone
Guardianship and third-party custody bring an older reader to the same website, on a desktop, with different needs.
Design conversations about family law traffic default to a thirty-five year old with a new phone. Some of your most serious inquiries come from someone in their late sixties who has had a grandchild in the house since spring.
Practical consequences: readable type at a comfortable size, real contrast rather than light gray on white, tap and click targets that forgive an unsteady hand, and a phone number rendered as text so it can be read out loud or written down.
Make one page printable. Older readers print things, take them to family, and come back. A fee page or a what-to-bring page that survives a printer earns more calls than it looks like it should.
Test with an actual person over sixty-five before you launch. An hour of watching someone use the site teaches more than a month of scroll maps.
The screen after somebody hits send is where most firms stop designing
The confirmation page is the first thing your firm actually delivers to a client, and it is usually a default message nobody wrote.
Say who will make contact, from what number, and inside what window you genuinely hit. Do not publish a promise your Friday afternoon staffing cannot keep, because the first broken commitment sets the tone for everything after it.
Tell them what to do if the situation is urgent, and what documents to start gathering. A short, calm list gives an anxious person something to do with the next hour, and it makes the eventual consultation better.
Match the automatic email to the same voice. Most firms send a template that reads like a receipt from a hardware store, which undoes the work every other page did.
Design the path for people you cannot help too. Inquiries from the Metro East when you practice only in Missouri, conflicts, matter types you do not take. A clear, kind exit protects your reputation in a market where lawyers on both sides of the county line know each other.
Questions we actually get
- Do we need a separate page for each suburb we serve?
- Only where the page has something real to say. St. Louis County contains a long list of separate municipalities and publishing a near-identical page for each one produces filler that competes with itself. Pages built around venue and matter type generally do more work than pages built around place names alone.
- Should we put pricing on the website?
- Some form of it, yes, even if it is a range or an explanation of how you bill rather than a fixed number. The cost question is the reason a large share of visitors leave, and answering it filters out people who were never going to retain you while building trust with those who will. Check the wording against attorney advertising rules with your own counsel.
- Is a chat widget worth adding to a family law site?
- It depends entirely on whether a human answers it during the hours it appears. An unstaffed chat window is a slow script and a broken promise at the same time. If you do run one, treat the transcripts as sensitive material and confirm your handling of them with your own counsel.
- How fast does the site actually need to be?
- Fast enough on a mid-range phone on cell service, which is the condition most of your visitors are in. Rather than chasing a score, remove what you are not using and measure again. Cutting unused scripts and font weights usually moves the number more than any image work.
- Should attorney photographs be professional headshots or something less formal?
- Either can work, but they should be photographs of your actual people in your actual office. Stock imagery of a courthouse or a generic conference room is recognizable to visitors and does nothing for trust. A picture of the building a client will be driving to also answers a practical question about where you are.
