Family law
Websites for family law attorneys.
Nobody arrives at a family law website to compare firms. They arrive at eleven at night, after something has happened, and they are trying to work out whether their situation is survivable. A site that opens with a list of services makes that person translate themselves into your categories first, at the worst possible moment to ask it of them.
The example website
- Firm
- Doe & Roe Family Law
- Practice
- Family law
- Pages, all of them working
- 8 pages
The example site
Doe & Roe Family Law
Family law and divorce · Brooklyn, Pretoria · 8 pages
A two-director family law practice in Brooklyn, Pretoria. Eight pages, all of them working.
The firm is invented — the name comes out of a law textbook — and every page of the site says so at the top. Everything else on it is real: every link goes somewhere, and every page is written.
What a family law website has to do
Let them recognise themselves in the first ten seconds
Divorce, maintenance, custody are your words. Theirs are “he has moved out”, “she will not let me see the children”, “papers have arrived”. A site whose first screen names the situation instead of the service is the difference between a reader who stays and one who goes back to the search results.
Answer the money question they are too embarrassed to ask
The fear underneath a family matter is almost always what it will cost, and it is the last thing anybody puts first on the telephone. Publishing the schedule — including the parts that are not your fee — takes the embarrassment out of the first call, and you get the call.
Be readable at eleven at night, on a phone, quietly
This is not desk research. It is done in bed, on a phone, often by somebody who does not want to be seen doing it. Small type over a photograph, a video that starts itself, a chat window that opens on its own — each of those loses that reader outright.
Sound like a consulting room, not an advertisement
No countdown, no “free divorce consultation” banner, no stock photograph of a broken wedding ring. The reader is deciding whether you are somebody they could say difficult things to, and everything on the page is evidence one way or the other.
Three decisions, and why
Each picture below is a screenshot of a real page on that site, not a drawing of one.
The site opens on situations, not services
Four entries — you are thinking about it, papers have arrived, you cannot see your children, the maintenance has stopped — each going to the page written for exactly that. The reader never has to work out which of our practice areas they belong to before they can begin.
The sequence is set out before anyone asks for it
Summons, ten court days to give notice of intention to defend, twenty to plead, then the part where everything is agreed or it is not — with the note that almost all of the work happens outside a courtroom and almost none of it inside one. A reader who can see the shape of it stops imagining the worst version.
The fee page names the costs that are not ours
Sheriff to serve a summons, High Court issuing fees, an advocate where one is briefed, an expert report where one is needed — with figures, and passed on at what they cost. Listing the money that is not yours is the fastest way to be believed about the money that is.
What it costs
Rebuilding the site you have is R8,500. A new one is R12,500 for a sole practitioner and R18,000 for two to five attorneys. Looking after it afterwards is from R1,950 a month. Every figure is published, so you can hold it against anybody else’s quote without asking us first.
Questions
- Our matters are confidential. Can a site say anything about our work at all?
- It can say how you work without saying who for. Everything on the example site is about how the firm works, how long things take and what they cost — there is not one client matter on it, and it still does the job. Testimonials are not the only kind of evidence.
- Should there be a live chat, or an enquiry form?
- A form, yes, and it goes to you and nowhere else. A chat window that opens on its own, no — this reader is often not alone in the room. The example site puts the telephone number and a short form where they are easy to find and never in the way.
- We act for mothers and for fathers. Does the site have to pick a side?
- No, and it should not. The example site is organised by situation, and a situation belongs to whoever is in it. Nothing on it assumes which parent is reading.
- Who owns it?
- You do. The domain is registered in your firm’s name from the first day, the content and photographs are yours, and so is the data the site collects. Twelve months, then month to month on sixty days’ notice.
Read next
Send us your firm’s web address.
We go through it against a written list of 69 checks and email you the six problems worth fixing first, each in one sentence, with what we measured. It costs nothing and we do not telephone you afterwards.