Design Resources for Law Firm Websites

Matt | November 8, 2016

Are you blogging regularly on your law firm website? Maybe you’re considering a website redesign? Or perhaps you’re just looking to improve your existing content? You may even be a designer looking for some extra tips.

Updating a website or just adding photos to your blog posts can be a time consuming and expensive process. This post is meant to provide some free and/or easy to use resources to help you keep your website fresh.

Images

Looking for high quality stock imagery for your blog posts or pages? A standard Google image search + copy/paste just won’t cut it (that usually falls under the category of theft). There are plenty of premium services out there. Here a few of my favorite (these will charge $5-$10 minimum per image or a monthly subscription model option):

Free Image Resources

If you’re looking for some easy free imagery, you’re going to lose out on quality, but those resources exist in droves. Sometimes you find some real gems, but you may have seen them used elsewhere online. Some of these resources require the use of (free) Creative Commons licenses – make sure to look for that! Here are some of my favorites:

  • Unsplash (The unparalleled success example of a free stock photo site. Mostly landscapes, very high quality, totally free.)
  • AllTheFreeStock (Aggregate of free stock resources – sometimes too much to handle!)
  • Creative Commons Search (Here you can search for CC licensed material from Flickr and other resources. Make sure to give credit/request use when necessary.)
  • Compfight (Similar functionality to CC search, but will provide you a CC license HTML credit snippet with the image!)

Custom Imagery

Nothing beats original content! If you have the means or ability to get original photos and/or illustrations – I recommend you make it happen. Your readers will love your original content.

Website Redesigns

Here at Mockingbird, we build all our website on the WordPress platform. Keep in mind, there’s a million and one ways to create a WordPress website.

Designing in WordPress isn’t always easy, especially depending on the theme you’re using. If you have WordPress questions, the best place to find answers is through the WordPress.org website or through a Google search. There are millions of WP users out there. Chances are, the answer to your question already exists on the web.

If you’re considering a move to WordPress or a WordPress website redesign – I have a recommendations for you. Make sure your theme or developer optimizes for SEO. You shouldn’t be getting multiple h1’s on every page or a non-mobile-friendly website. It doesn’t matter how great your site looks if you are facing major SEO problems like these.

WordPress Themes + Developers

  • Genesis Framework by Studiopress (I start here. You can get child themes for the framework, or hire a developer to build you one! Genesis is a perfect starting point.)
  • Custom coded theme (Make sure your developer/designer knows what they’re doing, I’ve seen some of the worst SEO problems on beautifully crafted custom themes.)

Building Your Own Site? Not a developer or designer?

This can be done, but make sure you research your SEO best practices! Designing with WordPress can be extremely easy if you aren’t too picky. Grab a theme, adjust some settings, add your content – BOOM done. Want to move your logo up 20 pixels? You might need a web designer for that :(. If you plan to design yourself, I have some themes to recommend:

  • Studiopress Themes (Again with Genesis by Studiopress! These child themes probably take the most knowledge to customize, but it can be done!)
  • The Seven Theme (I’ve used this. It may have more options than you could ever want, but you can make almost any design happen with the visual composer plugin.)
  • Keep it simple (Find a simple theme you love with limited options.)

Hosting? We recommend using a managed WordPress host for your site – we love WP Engine.

Designer/Developer Resources

If you’re a web designer and developer, you might already know about all of these resources. If you don’t, I suggest taking a peak!

All The Links

Blogs

Icons

  • Font Awesome (This is a free font style sheet that has to be loaded on your site, but can be implemented in content with HTML)

Colors

Video

  • Coverr (Free cover video resource.)

The Finale

I could keep linking and sharing resources that I use for another few pages, but I’ll stop here. Hopefully, you found some of those links helpful and good luck with your image searching!

Shameless plug: If you’re in need of a well designed, SEO friendly Law Firm website – we make those!