Family law traffic arrives on a phone, late, and in a hurry
Design for a small screen held by someone with poor patience and worse sleep, and the desktop version takes care of itself.
Phone number visible without scrolling, tappable, and repeated at every decision point. Not tucked into a header that collapses into a hamburger menu.
Text sizes that a stressed person can read one-handed. Long centred paragraphs and thin grey body copy are the two most common readability failures on law firm sites.
Speed matters more than the animation budget. Cut the hero video, compress the images, load the fonts locally, and get the page usable quickly on a mobile connection. Every second before the first meaningful paint is a share of visitors who never see your copy.
Assume the visit is interrupted. Someone reads three paragraphs, puts the phone down, comes back an hour later. Persistent navigation and clear page titles matter more than clever scroll effects that lose their place.
The first screen has to prove you handle this matter in this county
Two questions get answered above the fold or not at all: do you do my kind of case, and do you practise where my case is filed.
Name the matter types in plain language in the first block. Divorce, custody and timesharing, paternity, modification, relocation, prenuptial agreements, enforcement. Not 'comprehensive family law solutions'.
Name the venue. Palm Beach County and the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, with the courthouses you actually appear at. A visitor whose case sits in Division FJ at the North County Courthouse in Palm Beach Gardens is checking, quietly, whether you go up there.
Put a real photograph of a real attorney near the top. Stock imagery of gavels and handshakes reads as a template to anyone who has looked at three other firms this evening, which by that point they have.
One primary action, repeated: call, or request a consultation. A page offering five equally weighted choices produces fewer of all of them.
The enquiry form is a conflict check, not an intake interview
Ask for what you need to open a file and decline a conflict, and take the rest of the story on the phone.
The minimum useful set for this practice area: name, best contact method, the other party's name, county where the matter is or would be filed, whether anything has been filed or served yet, and whether children are involved. That is enough to run a conflict check and route the enquiry to the right attorney.
Opposing party name is the field most firms omit and the one that saves the most wasted time. Explain in one line why you are asking, because a spouse's name in a form field feels significant to the person typing it.
Everything else is friction. Case value, dates of marriage, employment details and long free-text boxes all reduce completions without improving the call that follows.
Say what happens next and when, in writing, on the page and in the confirmation. Silence after a submission is where family law enquiries go to die.
Add a short note about confidentiality and the fact that submitting a form does not create an attorney-client relationship. Wording is worth confirming with your own counsel.
Bar advertising rules decide what the site may claim about outcomes
In this trade, the copy constraints are external, and finding them out after launch is expensive.
The Florida Bar's advertising rules govern lawyer websites, including statements about results, testimonials, comparisons to other lawyers and claims of specialisation or expertise. Requirements change, so treat any specific rule as something to confirm with your own counsel or the Bar's advertising staff before publishing.
In most cases we design the pages so they do not depend on claims that might not survive review: process depth, matter-type clarity, attorney background, court and division familiarity. All of it persuades, none of it promises.
If you want reviews on the site, plan for them at the design stage, including how they will be presented and what disclaimers may be required. Retrofitting a testimonial section into a finished template usually looks bolted on because it is.
Keep required identifying information, office location and responsible attorney details consistent across every page and every landing page you run ads to. Campaign landing pages are the ones most often built outside the review process.
Attorney bios and courthouse pages outperform the homepage
Prospective family law clients hire a person, and they check where that person shows up.
Write bios like a client would read them, not like a directory entry. Which matters this attorney handles, how they work with clients, what a first meeting is like, and their actual admission and background. Bar admission and credentials belong there; invented personality does not.
Give each attorney a direct enquiry path. Splitting enquiries by attorney tells you which bios are working and gives the visitor a sense of choosing a person rather than an institution.
Courthouse pages earn their place because the county is dispersed: the Judge Daniel T. K. Hurley Courthouse in West Palm Beach, the North County Courthouse at 3188 PGA Blvd. in Palm Beach Gardens, the South County Courthouse in Delray Beach, the West County Courthouse in Belle Glade. Verify the current division-to-courthouse mapping before naming a division letter, since assignments are reorganised by administrative order.
Do not fabricate office locations to match courthouses. It is transparent to clients, and it creates problems with map listings you will spend months undoing.
Analytics and chat scripts on a divorce site are a privacy decision
What you install on a family law website can be read by the wrong person in the household.
Third-party chat widgets and session recording tools capture what visitors type. On a divorce site that can include allegations, addresses and children's names. Decide deliberately what you record, where it is stored and who can see it, and prefer tools that let you mask input.
Advertising pixels create retargeting, and retargeting on a shared device is a real safety issue for some family law clients. At minimum, exclude the pages most likely to be visited by someone at risk from your retargeting audiences.
Consider a visible quick-exit control on injunction and domestic violence pages, and a plain note about clearing browser history. It costs nothing and it signals that you understand who is reading.
Serve the whole site over HTTPS, keep the forms posting to your own domain where practical, and check what your form provider does with submissions. A family law enquiry is sensitive from the first keystroke.
Questions we actually get
- Should the site be built on WordPress or something else?
- Either can work. What matters more is that the firm can edit a practice-area page without a developer, that the forms post somewhere you control, and that the site loads fast on a phone. We will make a recommendation based on who maintains it after launch, because a platform nobody in the office can update becomes stale within a year and stale procedural content on a law firm site is a liability.
- Do we need a client portal or online payments?
- Payments, usually yes, because clients expect it and it shortens the gap between a decision and a retainer. A full portal is a bigger commitment and is worth building only if someone in the firm will keep it current. An abandoned portal is worse for client confidence than no portal.
- Can we publish results or client reviews on the site?
- Sometimes, subject to the Florida Bar's advertising rules on past results and testimonials, and subject to your own clients' willingness to be identified in a family matter. We generally design pages that persuade without them, and treat anything you do want to publish as something to confirm with your own counsel first.
- How much content does a family law site actually need?
- Fewer pages than most agencies sell, written far better. One strong page per matter type, one per attorney, one per courthouse you appear at, plus a small set of procedural explainers specific to the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit. Twenty excellent pages beat two hundred spun ones, and they are maintainable, which matters when an administrative order gets reissued.
- What about live chat and AI chatbots?
- Chat can lift enquiry volume, and it also captures sensitive text from someone whose device may be shared. If you use it, choose a provider whose data handling you have actually read, keep the bot from giving anything resembling legal advice, and make sure a human sees the transcript quickly. A chat widget that answers at 11pm and then nobody follows up by morning does more harm than good.
