Law Firm Website Design: Planned, Written and Built for Your Practice

What you get

A complete website, not a theme with your logo dropped in. Each project includes:

• A page plan based on your practice areas, offices and the clients you want to reach
• Written copy for every page, in plain Australian English, reviewed by you before launch
• A design drawn for your firm, with type, colour and photography chosen to suit the way you practise
• Practice area pages, lawyer profiles and office pages built from consistent templates your team can update
• Enquiry forms that collect only what you need and explain what happens next
• Technical set-up: secure hosting, HTTPS, redirects from your old pages, an XML sitemap and Google Search Console
• Accessibility testing against WCAG 2.2 Level AA ^[1]
• A handover session and a short written guide for whoever edits the site

Who it suits

Our process is designed for a firm of one to forty lawyers with a clear set of practice areas: family, criminal, wills and estates, property and conveyancing, employment, commercial, personal injury or migration. Barristers' chambers and sole practitioners fit the same process with fewer pages. Large firms with in-house marketing teams usually need something different, such as a design system their team runs, and we will say so if that is the better fit.

How the pages are planned

A law firm site is read by two groups. The first is people with a legal problem, often under stress, who want to know whether you handle their kind of matter, who they would deal with, what it might cost and how to start. The second is referrers, other lawyers and existing clients checking a name or a phone number. A good plan serves both without burying either.

We start with a list of matters you want to attract, then group them into practice area pages. Each one answers the questions a client asks at the first meeting: what the process looks like, how long it usually takes, which documents to gather and which costs to expect. Profiles come next, then office pages if you have more than one location, then the supporting pages: about, fees approach, contact and the legal pages.

Writing within the rules

Your website is advertising, so the copy has to meet Rule 36 of the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules: nothing false, misleading or deceptive, offensive or prohibited by law, and no use of "accredited specialist" unless the lawyer holds that accreditation ^[2]. We write with that in mind and mark any claim that needs evidence. A principal of the firm approves the final copy, because the duty sits with the firm, not the designer.

If you handle personal injury work in Queensland, there are extra limits on what can appear in advertising and where. The Queensland Law Society's guidance explains that fuller statements, including no-win-no-fee conditions, may appear only on the firm's own website ^[3]. The Legal Services Commission, which enforces PIPA, goes further: its guideline expects restricted content to be limited to existing clients or genuine enquirers, for example behind an enquiry step ^[6]. Our personal injury advertising guide explains the difference. We plan those pages separately and check them against the current rules before launch.

Design that suits a law practice

Clients judge credibility quickly, and the signals they read are mostly about care: consistent type, real photography of your people where you can, generous spacing and nothing that looks rushed. We avoid stock images of gavels and handshakes, and we avoid anything that might read as exploiting a client's situation.

Every design is checked for colour contrast and keyboard use as it is drawn, not afterwards. The Australian Human Rights Commission's guidelines advise organisations to meet the latest published version of WCAG ^[4], which is WCAG 2.2 ^[1].

Build and speed

Sites are built as fast static pages with a small, secure contact handler, or on a content management system when your team needs to publish often. Either way we aim for Google's Core Web Vitals "good" thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads ^[5].

What it costs

Cost depends on the number of practice areas and lawyers, whether we write the copy, and how much of your current site moves across. The pricing page explains how we scope and quote, and our cost guide lists published Australian market ranges with their sources.

Timeline

We plan for six to ten weeks from the signed scope to launch for a small or mid-sized firm. Copy approval depends on when partners can read the drafts, so we agree review dates at the start.