Since the vast majority of marketing takes place on the internet now, you need to ensure that you have a well-designed website that not only entices visitors to visit, but to continue reading your content. Good site design is based on many factors but most revolve around the human factor as humans both build and visit websites.
Law firms should be considerate of how they design their websites just like any other business. Typically, their sites are content heavy and should be thoughtfully set up to make digesting the information easier. Below are 4 factors that impacts how people react to the websites they visit.
Load time
In our fast, instant gratification-driven society, speed matters. Around 40% of people state that if a web page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, they leave. The mean wait time for web page loading is roughly 2.078 seconds. This does not leave much margin for error (about .922 seconds). Most websites take less than a second to load.
Load time can become vitally important for a law firm’s website. People searching for a lawyer usually need help quickly. For this reason, if your website fails to load in a timely fashion, they will leave your site and look for another.
Color Scheme
The color scheme of a website seems trivial; however, studies show that it can have a real impact of the effectiveness of a website. Website traffic for sites with a dark color scheme has shown a 2% growth; whereas, those with a light color scheme has grown by 1.3%. When broken down by color, green has seen the biggest jump (3%), followed by blue (2%). Websites with red coloring have seen a 1.35% drop.
Layout
When reading a website, most people’s eyes follow an F-shaped pattern—reading across the headline, down the page and then checking the left side (typically where important links or categories are found). If you design your website horizontally, you can also encourage a natural z-shaped reading pattern. Most visitors to a website will concentrate of the first two paragraphs, while others will only read the first few subheading words, bullet points and paragraphs (and then leave the site).
If you’re trying to increase your readership (and include information that can be listed), make use of bullet points. 70% of people state that they will read lists that have bullet points.
Trust
If your visitors cannot trust what they see and read when they visit your website, they will not visit again and, more than likely, they will pass along this knowledge to others. 94% of people state that the design of a website can make it less trustworthy—presumably, because a poor design could allude to the designer not having enough knowledge about the subject.
The issue of trust is even more important for a law firm website. Chances are when someone needs to hire a lawyer, they perform a google search. While people should choose a lawyer based on their skills, a person’s first impression is very important.
Ways you can improve your website’s trust:
- Include links to media coverage in your site’s content
- Include the logos for your most prominent clients somewhere on your site
- Don’t forget to showcase your social media sites
- Avoid using stock photography
- Avoid using pre-made templates
Need help with your law firm website design? Please contact us for further information, or continue browsing https://www.seolegal.com/ to learn more.
