There are dozens and dozens of things that lawyers need to know about in order to have an awesome law firm website and in order to make it perform. But certainly the first and most important thing that lawyers need to understand if they are about to create a law firm website is you must use a platform where you own what you are creating. There are a lot of low cost website providers out there that will throw up a good website for you and it’s relatively low cost and it’s one stop shop and it’s very attractive. You just pay a fee, all of a sudden you got a site, but you actually don’t own the site or the content that you put on the site. If you read the fine print and there are horror stories of lawyers that will get in bed with a website company and they will work for a year or two on a website and then they will get dissatisfied and they will decide that they want to maybe invest more in search engine optimization or they want to go to a different digital partner to help them take their website to the next level.

And they go to their website provider and the website provider says, “Okay, well, if you’re leaving, then we’re going to shut your site down.” It’s like, “Well, what are you talking about? ” I’m the one that wrote all the content. I’m the one that did everything that appears on the website. And if you go back and you read the contract, their entire business model is that you can continue to have that website up as long as you work with them, but you can’t take it with you. And so the very first thing that you need to understand, if you are going to invest in a website, unless you’re just setting up a basic call and card website that is going to go away, the number one thing that I would say is that you should get some kind of a website on a platform where you own the content, you own the front end, you own the backend.

And in order to do that, all you have to do is you got to ask whoever is going to be preparing this website for you, can you take your website on the road? I use WordPress. I think that the WordPress platform is the gold standard for websites. I started my website by buying the domain and I gave it to a website company and they built it up. And I decided after a while that I wanted to invest more in search engine optimization. And so I moved over to a digital marketing agency and I was able to bring the keys to the site with me and to give it to the new agency. And I had a great experience with them for a long time. And then I decided that I wanted to go in a different direction about 18 months ago and I was able to take my website to another provider.

And so you need to make sure that if you’re spinning up a new website, that you have the ability to take the content, take the website with you, you own everything, and you’re not going to get held hostage by a company that seems really attractive at the outset because they’re able to spin it up for you quickly and easily, but you don’t actually own your content. So that is the number one thing that lawyers who are thinking about creating a law firm website need to chase down before they commit to spinning up that website with one particular provider or another. I am very happy with my decision to go with a WordPress website, and that could be a good option for you as well.