Good website content drives the success of a law firm website. However, it’s not the only feature that a successful law firm website needs. Your site also needs easy-to-use navigation.
Potential clients are likely to leave your site if it’s difficult for them to find the information that they need.
The best way to develop your law firm website’s navigation is to start with a few pages and leave room for growth and development in the future. Here’s how to create a navigation that is easy for your potential clients to use and keeps all of your content neatly organized.
Start with a simple law firm website navigation.
As you begin your law firm’s website, start with a few practice area pages. These should serve as a broad overview that leave room to develop your site and add more content in the future. We often recommend that attorneys start with a few pages with general summaries and develop increasingly specific pages over time (more about that below).
Let’s look at a few practice area-specific examples to see what this broad overview style might look like for different attorneys.
Example: DUI Defense Attorney
A DUI defense attorney is just beginning a law firm website. At first, this website might contain only a few practice area pages. It might look something like this:
These pages might provide a broad but useful overview to potential clients. In this example, the “DUI Penalties” page might give an overview of the potential penalties for a DUI in Arizona.
Over time, this DUI Penalties page might develop to include specific subpages for first, second, and third DUI penalties; the penalties for an underage DUI; professional licenses and DUIs; a page dedicated to license suspensions, and more.
Arranging topics in this way allows you to grow and develop your site over time in a way that makes sense to potential clients.
Example: Personal injury Law Firm
A personal injury attorney who is just beginning a law firm website will also want to start with a few broad overview practice area pages. This attorney may start with one page on auto accidents, another on truck accidents, and a third on bicycle accidents. Over time, each of these pages should be developed to include numerous related subtopics.
For example, the auto accidents page could be expanded to include:
- Common causes of accidents
- Injuries after an auto accident
- Insurance laws in your state
- Dangers of accidents
- Overview of auto defects
…and more.
Use a nested structure for your law firm website’s navigation.
Some attorneys who examine the development of these pages in the above example may think that they can or should stop after they’ve developed a few of these pages. However, you’re likely to need substantially more content than that to succeed online.
For example, a personal injury attorney in the example above might stop after creating a basic page about injuries after an auto accident. Instead, he/she should develop detailed subpages for this topic. These could, for example, explain various types of injuries that are common in car accidents:
Neck injuries, back injuries, injuries to the head, eyes, or limbs, crushing injuries, broken bones, herniated discs, whiplash…
If you’re not using the right tools to develop your content, this volume of pages can become unruly. One of the best ways to organize these many pages and topics is to use a nesting structure (LawLytics makes this easy to do).
Much like the development of your pages, nesting takes a broad-to-specific approach that makes it easy for potential clients to narrow in on topics of interest. Let’s say a potential client for a personal injury firm was hurt in an auto accident. Whether the potential client is referred to your firm or finds you through research, nesting your content will help her find what she needs.
Let’s say you’ve arranged your site navigation as follows:
- Personal Injury
- Auto accidents
- Auto Accident Injuries
- Neck Injuries
- Back Injuries
- Broken Bones
- Whiplash
- Auto Accident Injuries
- Auto accidents
Easy to use website navigation can have a positive psychological influence on a potential client. For example, when this potential client is able to quickly find your site’s section on auto accidents, she’ll feel good about being able to find important information, and you’ll have made it easy for her to start understanding more about her problem. When she finds the detailed section on auto accident injuries nested within the auto accident section, she is likely to see that you understand her problem. And, when she finds the detailed section on specific injuries that are relevant to her (whiplash, broken collar bone), she will begin to understand that you are an attorney whose expertise she can trust. Your nested navigation has made it easy for her to find what she needs and draw the conclusion that you are an authority who she can trust to handle her problem.
LawLytics makes building user-friendly site navigation easy.
It’s important to use good technology that lets you alter your site navigation as you develop your law firm’s website. The LawLytics platform lets you easily add and edit new pages and change their arrangement on your site with just a few clicks. To learn more about changing page arrangements with LawLytics, see “How to Nest & Reorder Pages in Your Navigation With LawLytics.”