When we think about what to put on a firm website, remember that your clients are normal people, and so are you. Why do you visit a business’ website? Determine what’s helpful to you and add it to your firm’s site. Here are examples to get you started:
Schedule appointments that work for you and the client
One way to minimize distracting calls is to let folks pick appointment times themselves, in the calendar windows you allow. Services like Microsoft Bookings and Calendly sync with your calendar, allowing clients to see when you're free and schedule an appointment directly on your calendar.
Letting clients schedule appointments for themselves seems intimidating at first, but you can create rules to protect your time. “Buffer time” blocks time before and/or after the appointment, ensuring a gap to prepare for the meeting or organize your notes afterward. You can limit how soon clients can schedule appointments, guaranteeing plenty of heads-up to prepare for the meeting. You can also specify how far in the future someone can schedule and limit what hours are available each day of the week.
Both Bookings and Calendly offer code snippets, sometimes called “embed” or “widget” code, to add this scheduling functionality to your existing site.
Collect more information upfront using web forms
Clients completing intake or other informational forms in your office is as popular with them as filling out medical forms with a clipboard and dry ballpoint pen is with you. Apart from being time-consuming and annoying, no one wants to interpret the handwritten last name of a stranger.
Make life easier for clients and yourself by adding to your website tools you may already pay for: Google Forms and Microsoft Forms. Each is included with many Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 plans, respectively.
When selecting an intake form tool, ensure it meets the security requirements in your jurisdiction or practice area for the data you collect, e.g., HIPAA compliance for medical information. The free version of many tools is less secure than the paid version.
As with Bookings and Calendly, you can add questionnaires from each company’s forms product to your website.
In addition to these “general purpose” forms, Lawmatics, a web-based, legal-specific customer relationship management (CRM) application, provides more advanced options for forms on your firm site. If you subscribe to Clio Manage, its companion CRM product, Clio Grow, is another route to consider.
Explore the wide world of plugins
Many firms host their website on Squarespace or Wix, or they build the site using WordPress, which is available through countless providers. All support plugins written for their respective platform in addition to the embed and widget code mentioned above.
Plugins expand your website’s functionality, empowering you to go beyond text, videos, and images. Some potentially useful plugins for your law firm include a booking calendar (see above), advanced search features (to aid visitors in finding information on your site), and a chatbot or live chat. These features help your website live up to its potential and benefit clients — more than a mere business card.
Squarespace and Wix are self-contained, meaning they host your site online and provide the software that creates and customizes your pages. This approach offers a curated experience conceived and designed by one company. Its downside lies in being “closed source,” meaning that the software is not freely available for folks to modify and extend. Vendors permit plugins for these platforms at their discretion. Useful Squarespace plugins for a firm website include Dropbox, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, and Weglot. Wix plugin options include Dropbox, Magic Form Builder, and Social Media Stream.
WordPress has the most varied plugins of the three platforms. A web search for “law firm WordPress plugins” produces dozens of “top 10” lists of valuable plugins. While the WordPress software is free, the site hosting costs money, as do several popular plugins.
Being “open source” software means anyone can write and distribute a WordPress plugin. That’s beneficial — lots of plugins, but also a security concern. Before installing any WordPress plugin to your website, ensure it isn’t risky — download plugins only from official repositories. Read reviews from other users and explore what permissions the plugin requests.
While plugins offer valuable opportunities to enhance client interactions, you must prioritize website security over features. Don’t cut corners and leave your site vulnerable to hackers and malware.
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