Effective websites employ a variety of techniques to bring menus, forms, buttons and text to life. A well designed website will apply these details on a pixel level in order to achieve the right balance. No single effect leaps off the screen individually, but without them the user experience would not be the same.

Try these simple techniques to take your firm’s website to the next level:

Depth, texture, light and shadow: Does your firm have one area of practice that is more lucrative than others? Highlight that area with a lighting effect or subtle color variation. Do you want to direct clients to a certain page? Give the desired link more depth with pixel perfect highlights or shading.

Borders and content delineation: It is important for a website to have clear, aesthetic separation between blocks of content. Content must be organized to flow logically and direct users to take a desired action. Borders are critical to achieving that organization. Light, subtle borders will help make your website easy to scan and read, prompting prospects to spend more time on your site – which ultimately leads to conversion. But when done poorly, or overdone, borders add visual noise to a page, and can cause potential clients to become overwhelmed and click away.

Font face, size and spacing: The right choice of font can help set the mood of an entire site. In the past, designers were limited to a small set of fonts, with the big choice basically being between serif (Times) and sans serif (Verdana). The development of web fonts has opened up a wide variety of options, giving your firm the chance to select a font that distinguishes you from your competition. Within that font family, use variation in weights and sizes to direct users.

Behind every successful law firm website is a strategy for appealing potential clients. Once that strategy has been established, choose the right set of visual effects to make your attorney website work. While each individual element is subtle, the overall effect is a striking website that clearly shows clients why they should hire your firm.

Let’s Build a Bigger Law Firm™ Together

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, law marketing, lawyer website, law firm web design and attorney websites visit Seolawfirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

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What is changing is the content itself. Whereas the online marketing strategies of the past involved producing a lot of long, extensive articles and content pieces, the new law firm marketing strategy is about more, shorter pieces of content. But this presents challenges of its own.

To keep social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus and Pinterest relevant, law firms need to post interesting comments and links. Otherwise, those profiles become just another advertisement rather than a community.

At the same time, if a law firm posts links to brief pieces of content that are worthless or too abridged to provide any real information, then those social network profiles are essentially spam. They will not lead to new cases, but instead will discourage prospects from reading anything that comes from that firm.

The new role for content is to be short but dense. Pack as much useful information as possible in a brief 200-300 word blog post. It’s short but it’s interesting and helpful. Those blog posts then get linked and plugged on your social network profiles and drive traffic back to your law firm’s website.

So content’s new role in legal marketing is to be more informative in fewer words and be released more frequently. It’s how law firms are going to get bigger now and in the near future.

Let’s Build a Bigger Law Firm™ Together

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

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Technically defined, niche marketing is marketing that is targeted to focus on a sub set of potential customers or prospects. Finding your law firm’s niche and using it wisely has many advantages, particularly in a down economy. Attorneys can benefit from niche marketing because it helps them offer unique and distinct reasons why prospects should choose them. On the other hand, the strategy of trying to be all things to all people can water down your message and may not bring in the type or volume of cases you require.

Specific advantages include:

• Firms can position themselves as leaders and experts, giving them a distinct competitive edge.
• Firms can offer prospects a greater value because of their specific knowledge and expertise.
• Firms can communicate directly with prospects and offer relevant information that helps connect with their needs.
• A targeted focus creates a more efficient use of marketing resources and higher conversion from prospects in need of your services.
• Focusing on quality instead of quantity can help grow your practice with a higher volume of good cases.

Finding your niche is as easy as understanding your firm’s strengths and studying the types of cases you handle most frequently. This goes beyond just generalized practice areas like Elder Law of Personal Injury. Your competition is advertising precisely the same things.

For example, perhaps your firm takes a lot of Business Law cases. Is there a subset of that area your firm can claim as a specialty, like entity formation or financing of green technologies? If you are an immigration attorney, do you handle cases involving certain types of visas more often than others? Are there cases you take within any practice area that are more profitable and desirable?

Answering these questions is key to carving out a niche that can help you distinguish yourself from the competition and grow your firm. When clients ask you why they should hire your firm, you will have a ready answer in your unique offering. You will be able to provide value and land new, higher value cases.

Let’s Build a Bigger Law Firm™ Together

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, law marketing, lawyer website, law firm web design and attorney websites visit Seolawfirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: The Bigger Law Firm magazine | The Bigger Lawyer Social Network | Legal News |Attorney Press Release Distribution

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Start learning from nature. Just because your firm’s website is sitting on a server and displayed on an “artificial” screen does not mean you should discard the lessons nature can teach us about effective color harmony. Colors pulled from naturally occurring combinations are less jarring and artificial and are much more likely to produce a memorable, unique and pleasant emotional response.

Get away from the standards. Using nature as an inspiration for your color scheme choices can make for some surprising, effective and memorable online destinations. It can help your firm move away from standard, overused color palettes.

Sometimes even leaders in their industries fall prey to using the same boring colors as everything else. Take computing: HP, Intel, IBM and Microsoft are all predominately blue and gray. It is as though they all got together and signed some pact to be predictable. Health care is another example: United, Humana, Aetna, and Blue Cross are all predominately blue, green and gray. With all this sameness, how is a user supposed to remember what sites they have been to or what they have seen? Since most firms do not have such national name recognition, it is even more important for your firm to distinguish itself from the competition.

Learn from your surroundings. Choosing a unique color scheme can get you out of design ruts. Effective color schemes give your content focus and allow your content and navigation to stand out in natural contrast. Try to open up to new possibilities – inspiration is literally all around you. You are most likely already carrying a digital camera with you at all times in your phone. Use it to snap off a shot every time you see a particularly compelling, colorful scene. Great ideas can be anywhere.

Do not abandon your brand. If your firm already has established colors, use those. While you can vary the tint or shade – the amount of white or black you add to a color – do not change color schemes altogether. Subtle variations can create emphasis, highlight relevant content, direct users to navigation, or make the flow of information and graphics more harmonious. A complete abandonment of established brand messaging will confuse customers and make your overall firm image seem thrown together and unprofessional. Be sure to make your firm’s image as polished, focused and trustworthy, as are the services you offer to clients.

Before beginning the process of setting up accounts and profiles, take the time to put some thought into your brand. In social media situations, developing a personal brand is particularly important. Personal branding is simply the method by which you market yourself to the world. The concept has received a lot of attention in reference to celebrities, but personal branding is not just for high-profile public figures. Everyone needs a personal brand.

Think about how you would like yourself – and by extension your firm – to be perceived. Brainstorm on some words and phrases that you would like people to use to describe you. Consider your target audience and what they are likely to be looking for in an attorney. Narrow that down to a few keywords and then reaffirm those words with everything you do. Pick appropriate profile pictures and always use the same avatar. Different networks allow different levels of profile customization; take advantage of sites like Twitter and YouTube that give you more leeway to style your pages. Make sure color choices, images and descriptions are consistent across all accounts.

Once you have reaffirmed your brand strategy, take care to control your message. It does not matter if you are a large firm with many attorneys or a sole practitioner, everything you put out across social media channels should appear as though it is coming from the same source. This is easier if you alone are responsible for social media outreach, simply be conscious of your audience and the keywords you established with your personal brand and stick to them. If you are a large firm with multiple attorneys participating in social media outlets, make sure the attorneys are collaborating on their message. Take the time to meet and discuss social media participation and review each attorney’s role. Do not just leave it to chance and assume everyone is on the same page.

This is not to say that your individual attorneys cannot have any personality whatsoever. They should. In fact, connecting with clients emotionally is key to bringing in new business. But it is also important that your firm is not coming across as corporate and conservative on Facebook but impulsive and casual on Twitter. Your attorneys need to be using a consistent tone.

Different social media platforms offer attorneys unique ways to promote their firms and build business. Use the tools each provides to take advantage of them in the optimum way. But always remember that everything you do, from videos on YouTube to articles on your blog to links shared on Twitter must reflect a consistent marketing and branding strategy.

Copy and photography create something of a chicken and egg scenario in website design. Which comes first? That may depend on whom you ask. Some claim that they come up with the visual concept first and then create headline options that they can winnow down to create the perfect mix. Others will claim that the copy has to come first – that without the words it is impossible to develop the right visual.

In order to be effective, a law firm website’s photography and copy must be developed in harmony with each other. They must make sense together in a way that motivates prospects and opens their minds to the benefits of working with your firm. They should offer a vision that goes beyond the literal into the potential.

A strong dominant picture should illustrate desired outcomes: the security of a home, the success of a business or the ability of an injured individual to live a full life. These pictures do not show what your firm does, literally, nor do they focus on situational details like a city, a local courthouse or the building in which your firm is located. They show results.

A great picture or illustration also needs great copy. Words matter. Research shows that people are drawn to headlines, and in some cases spend more time reading copy than they do looking at pictures. A good lawyer website will take advantage of this fact by using strong headlines that build on the benefit illustrated in graphic elements. Why is a family able to play happily in their back yard? Because your firm helped them feel secure through proper planning.

The feeling that is evoked through effective picture and headline combinations can help establish trust and allow prospects to connect with your firm. When users connect with your message and understand how you can help them, they are more likely to call.

Since attorney websites must often utilize large amounts of copy for online marketing purposes, the way in which that text is displayed is an important part of a website’s overall look and feel. Just as everything your law firm does is a part of your brand, everything you put on your firm’s website is a part of the design. Text included.

Text is one of the most important graphic elements of a lawyer website and, too often, one of the most neglected. Designers may spend copious amounts of time creating an interesting, attention-grabbing header and then ignore the rest of the page altogether. The result is that a big chunk of what visitors see is just an unstyled standard font. This is in some part due to outdated thinking about fonts – there was a time only a few fonts were guaranteed to be accessible to all users. But with the advent of Google Web Fonts, designers now have hundreds of non-standard fonts from which to choose. The perfect font that makes the right statement about your firm is out there, waiting to be put to use.

Failure to put time in to font choices and text formatting makes the bulk of the website seem predictable and formulaic. Attorney website templates and template based services tend to use the same fonts repeatedly. Because of this, visitors have more than likely seen a lot of lawyer websites that look very similar, and you do not want your firm’s website to blend in with the rest.

Ignoring a website’s fonts and styling can also negatively affect readability. Fonts need to be sized and spaced in a way that is easy on the eye. A good rule of thumb is that text should be spaced at about one and a half times the size of the text. No more than two fonts should be used in any layout, and fancy or display fonts do not generally work well online. Text should also be broken up with list elements and headers. These are all design elements that contribute to a site’s professional look and help your firm stand above the competition.

But business cards, the venerated elders of the marketing world, are still relevant. And they have to work hard for your firm. They must give a memorable first impression and keep working long after they are handed over. They are your mini brand ambassadors.

Your business card may be the only physical item colleagues and prospects have connecting them to your firm. While online referrals are an increasingly lucrative source of new business, attorneys still have ample opportunity to hand out business cards at social and professional events. You never know when you are going to meet a potential client. Someone you ran into months ago at a convention or yesterday at a luncheon may one day need you.

The business card, while small, can speak volumes. Your firm may be top of your market, but a flimsy, poorly designed card says all the wrong things. Fortunately, there are plenty of creative ways to spice up a business card on any budget. Here are a few tips:

1. Pick a quality paper. At the very least, pick a sturdy stock. You may also consider using a unique finish or texture. Cards are tactile. Use that feature to your advantage.

2. Use unique graphics (or none at all). Standard graphics, like gavels and handshakes, are not memorable. Even if your firm is corporate or conservative (and must design accordingly), there is a unique picture out there for you. Try to find a different angle ¬¬– literally or figuratively – on a common subject.

3. Draw attention with pops of color. Even cards that only use one or two colors can use them wisely. Colors draw attention to important information and make a card stand out from its boring competition. When people are glancing through a collection of cards, the right use of color can get yours noticed.

4. Include only essential information. Business cards do not need to tell your life story. They need to give people an easy way to contact you. Simple cards that use white space effectively will stand out among clutter. Direct people to your website for additional information or details.

5. Use die cuts or interesting shapes. Business cards do not have to be a perfect rectangle. They can be circles, ovals, squares, talk bubbles or any other shape. They can utilize die cuts within the rectangle. Just be sure that, whatever the shape, they will fit in a standard business card holder. Make your card unique, not difficult to hold on to.