About Divorce Web Designer

Christopher Ross here. I have been building things on the web since 1996, which means I have watched an entire industry talk small firms into renting their own front door and calling it a service.

Let me be plain about what I am and what I am not.

I am not an attorney, a mediator, or any kind of legal professional, and this site is not a law firm. I am a web designer. I will never tell you what your practice may or may not claim in its advertising, because attorney advertising rules vary by state and province and that is a question for your bar counsel, not for a vendor.

What I do know is the two halves of this job that most legal-web vendors treat as one.

The person on the other end of your site

The first half is the reader. Somebody searching for a family law attorney is not shopping the way somebody shops for a contractor. They are anxious, they are usually short on time, and a good number of them are searching privately: on a phone, in a parked car, late at night, on a device somebody else might pick up in the morning.

That reader behaves differently from a normal web visitor. They skim faster. They abandon anything that makes them fill in a long form before they know what it costs. They read the fee page before the bio page. They want to know what actually happens on the first call before they will make it. And they are far more likely than an average visitor to open your site, close it, and come back three days later, which means the page has to be findable and legible on a second visit that starts from scratch.

Design that ignores all of that is design for the firm rather than for the client. Most of it is.

The craft half

The second half is the build itself, and there is nothing special about legal work here. A site has to load fast on a bad connection, read cleanly at arm's length on a phone, be structured so search engines can tell your custody page from your support page, and be maintainable by whoever runs your office rather than only by me.

The same electrician wires a clinic and an accountant's office. The load is different, the code is the same. I have been doing the code part for thirty years.

The other practice

My larger and more complicated projects run under my own name at thisismyurl.com, working with universities, media companies, and government teams, priced for that scale. I am also a graduate student in learning and technology, which is a long way of saying I spend a lot of my time thinking about how people actually take in information under pressure.

A two-attorney family law practice deserves the same craft as a university does, whatever the difference in budget between the two. So Divorce Web Designer is a separate practice with its own fixed prices, built specifically for family law firms, rather than a discount lane on a bigger invoice.

Same hands, same standards, sized for the job.

What you own

You own whatever I build for you, without qualification. Domain, hosting account, every file, registered in your firm's name from day one, rather than in mine. If you decide in three years that somebody else should look after it, there is nothing to negotiate back and no export fee to argue about.

That is not a favor, and I would rather not have to advertise it. That it works as a selling point at all says more about how this vertical has been sold than about me.

Talk to me

Tell me what kind of matters you want more of and what you want the site to do for the practice. If I am not the right fit, I will say so and point you somewhere better.

Email hello@divorcewebdesigner.com, or use the contact form.

If what your practice needs is help getting found rather than a site to be found on, DivorceSEO.com is the sister site for that, run by the same person.