Why You Should Not Lease Your Law Firm’s Website

Imagine for a moment that you buy a house. Over the years, you pay the mortgage company and finally, you owe nothing. The mortgage company then tells you that you have to buy your house (the house you just paid off) in order to truly own it. You would not let that happen, so why do some lawyers agree to such a practice with their website?

When having a website built for your firm, it is important to own your website. Your law firm’s site is a lot more than just an advertisement. Over time, it is going to be a financial investment as well as a time investment as you work with your marketing company to add content to the site and turn the website into a powerful marketing tool.

Some legal marketing companies design websites that are only leased to your firm and then if you leave, they sell your website to you to take somewhere else. Of course if the site was built on a proprietary content management system (website editor), you will have to pay to have the design programmed into an out of the box content management system. Once you calculate the cost of buying your website (again) and having it programmed into a content management system, it is generally less expensive to have a new site built from scratch.

Here are some important questions to ask your prospective legal marketing/website design company.

1) Who owns my custom website design and content? – If the answer is anything but an unconditional “you,” run away. Unless the company is offering a discounted template based plan (in which case they rightfully own the design), you should own the design and all content that was custom created for you.

2) Is the content management system proprietary? – If the company uses a proprietary content management system, your exit strategy is going to require an additional re-programming investment of $1,000 – $4,000 depending on the advanced features of your site. It is best if the company uses an off the shelf or open source content management system because that makes your site compatible with 90% of standard web hosting companies.

3) How will my website be found? – The value of your website will forever be unknown if nobody finds it. If the company says “we build links” or “we optimize your site,” you should demand a detailed outline of how this is done. Adding one keyphrase on your home page or linking to your site from one of their directories is not a sufficient search engine optimization strategy. Request details. Good companies are generally eager to show off their robust marketing packages if they truly stand above the competition.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

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