A website that qualifies callers before you pick up the phone

A site you own outright, plus an intake form that does the first two minutes of qualifying for you. One fixed fee, no monthly bill.

You are the attorney, the intake coordinator, and the person who answers the phone at four forty on a Friday. Every unbilled twenty minutes spent discovering that a caller lives two states away, or wants a criminal defense lawyer, or has already retained somebody, comes directly out of the only inventory you have.

So a solo's website has a different job than a firm's. It is not a brochure. It is the first filter.

The $99-a-month question

Most solos in this position are comparing this against a template vendor charging somewhere between $79 and $199 a month, all in, site plus hosting plus "support."

Do the arithmetic once, because nobody selling it will do it for you. At $99 a month, three years is $3,564. Five years is $5,940. Starter here is $2,800, paid once.

The monthly number is not the real problem though. The real problem is what you have at the end of it. On most of those platforms the pages are built in a proprietary editor that cannot export, the domain is frequently registered in the vendor's name rather than the firm's, and the hosting account is theirs. Stop paying and the site is simply gone, along with whatever search history the address had built up.

That is worth understanding in detail before you sign anything, including with me. I wrote it up here: Who owns your law firm's website when you fire your web designer?

Here, the domain is registered to your firm, the hosting account is in your name, and the whole thing is standard software you could hand to any competent developer on the planet. That is the entire pitch.

The intake form is the part that pays for itself

A walk-in clinic does not send you straight to the doctor. Somebody at the front asks three or four questions first, so the fifteen minutes with the actual clinician get spent on the actual problem. Nobody experiences that as rude. It is the reason the visit works.

Your contact page can do the same job, and on most solo sites it does not. The typical family law contact form asks for name, email, phone, and "how can we help," which produces a message box full of narrative and tells you almost nothing you can triage on.

A form that earns its place asks a small number of structured questions before you ever pick up the phone:

• Is the other party in agreement, or is this contested? This single question separates the flat-fee uncontested matter from the litigated one, and it changes the fee conversation completely.
• Are there children under eighteen? Custody and support change scope, urgency, and often jurisdiction.
• Where do you live, and where does the other party live? Filters out-of-jurisdiction inquiries before they cost you a call.
• Has either party already filed, or been served? Turns a "sometime soon" into a deadline you can see.
• Has the other party already retained counsel? Tells you what the clock looks like.
• What is the best way and time to reach you? More important here than in almost any other practice area, because a call to the wrong number at the wrong hour can genuinely cause a problem at home.

Six questions, all short, all answerable with a tap. The form then hands you a message you can sort in about eight seconds, and lets you call back the three real matters first instead of in the order they arrived.

There is a longer version of this with the exact field types, the ordering that works, and the questions to leave off: A divorce lawyer's website intake form: what to ask before the first call.

What a solo site actually needs

Five pages, usually. A home page that names what you do and where you do it in the first line. One real bio page, because for a solo the firm and the person are the same thing and people are deciding whether they can stand to sit across a table from you. Two or three matter pages covering the work you actually want more of. A contact page carrying the intake form.

That is it. A twenty-page site for a one-attorney practice is twenty pages you have to keep current, and stale pages do more damage than missing ones.

Two things belong high on the home page and are usually buried:

What the first conversation costs and how long it takes. Free, flat fee, or hourly, and thirty minutes or an hour. The single most common reason a visitor closes a family law site without calling is that they cannot tell whether the call itself will cost them money.

What happens after they send the form. One sentence. "I read every inquiry myself and reply within one business day." A person who has never hired a lawyer before does not know whether they are about to be contacted by you, by a call center, or by nobody.

Starter is the size

Starter, $2,800, one time. Home page, attorney bio, two or three matter pages, contact page with the intake form, a content management system so you can change your own fees and hours, and a basic SEO package so the pages are structured legibly from launch.

No monthly retainer, nothing that renews on its own. Hosting and the domain renew annually and cost about what a phone line does.

If your practice grows into multiple attorneys, Grow at $4,500 is the next size up, and none of the Starter work is thrown away in the move.

Pricing shown in USD. See Canadian-dollar pricing →

Two things I will not do

I will not advise you on attorney advertising rules. Whether a given phrase, testimonial, fee description, or disclaimer is permitted where you practice is a bar question and belongs to your bar counsel. What I will do is build the pages so required disclosure text sits where it needs to sit and you can edit it yourself the day guidance changes.

I will not sell you a size you do not need. If Starter covers it, that is the quote you get.

Start with a conversation

Tell me what kind of matters you want more of. If I am not the right fit, I will say so and point you somewhere better. If the site is fine and it's the Google listing that's the actual problem, DivorceSEO's solo-practitioner page covers that instead.

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