Key Takeaways

• Even when you’re busy with client work, you need to make time for your own business’s needs.
• Having structure and accountability is key to keeping projects on track.
• It’s better to break a big project into pieces than not to tackle it at all.
• Don’t let perfection interfere with progress.

Over our more than 20 years working with small law firms, The Modern Firm has expanded our services to meet our clients’ needs, including branding and marketing. But the foundation of the company was law firm website design, and that is still a substantial part of what we do. 

Our VP of Client Relations, Kristin Lay, often notes, “Websites are like cars; you can usually get a pretty good idea of when they were built by looking at them.” In other words, websites that had a cutting-edge look when they were designed usually start to look dated a few years out. That includes law firm websites…and websites for companies that design law firm websites. 

Yes, we noticed that our website was showing its age a bit. We were still doing a brisk business, and the site functioned well, but let’s face it: when your business is designing websites, your own website needs to showcase what you can do for your clients—not what you could do in 2014. In short, it was time for an update. 

Lesson #1: Empathy (Or, Why the Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes)

Now, in fairness, it didn’t take us ten years to decide to redesign our website. It took us eight years to reach that conclusion—then the project itself took another two years. 

Two years to redesign a website? For a company whose literal business is designing websites? Well, yes. But give us a chance to explain! 

There are a lot of decisions and a lot of moving parts that go into designing a new website. And while many of the decisions are enjoyable (This logo or that one? What color scheme?) the process is still time-consuming, especially when you’re committed to getting things just right. 

Meanwhile, we were still busy with our own clients’ website needs, which necessarily took priority. As the saying goes, “the cobbler’s children have no shoes;” in other words, most businesses put their clients’ needs before their own. That includes our own attorney clients, who are so busy helping their clients with urgent matters that their own business needs go on the back burner. 

As our president Brendan Chard observed, “Going through our own website redesign gave us empathy for our clients and what might be going on for them when the project falls off the radar for a while.” We were reminded that when attorneys get stalled on their website project, it’s not because they don’t care; they’re just focused on taking care of their clients first. 

That’s pretty noble, if you think about it. But at the end of the day, you (we) still have to update your (our) website. Which leads us to Lesson #2.

Lesson #2: The Value of Structure and Accountability

It’s one thing to learn that it’s easy to kick the can down the road on a website project. But how do you actually carve out the time to make real progress? It depends on what kind of person you are. 

One kind of person looks at a goal and says, “I want to achieve X goal by Y date. I will put in a lot of effort today, so that I have to put in minimal effort later.” Then they do just that; the project proceeds smoothly and without incident, and no one is stressed.

The other 99.5% percent of us need some accountability. 

Often what that looks like is some hard deadline beyond which we can’t kick the can any further: an important meeting with a boss, a final exam, or a trial date, for instance. When that deadline looms, the effort ramps up—and so does the stress.

The problem is that most website redesigns don’t have a hard deadline to create accountability. There’s already a website, if a less than ideal one. So, we learned to build accountability into the process—throughout the process.

Our website redesign didn’t really take off until our leadership team started having regular meetings about it, with action items for participants. Each meeting served as a mini-deadline; knowing that the other participants were expecting tasks to get done kept people accountable and moved the process forward.

That made us think that building in more structure might also be helpful for our clients’ projects. We don’t want the website process to be stressful for you; on the other hand, you are paying us to help keep you on track and bring your new website to fruition, and we want to provide the support you need. 

Our own experience reminded us of the value of  regular check-ins, as well as understanding the cost of delay. When a website project stalls, another moves in to occupy the time it would have taken, and restarting takes extra time, resources, and effort. The Modern Firm provides structure to keep clients and their projects moving forward steadily, rather than in frustrating starts and stops. We try to balance flexibility and empathy for attorneys’ busy practices with accountability to the process.

Lesson #3: Breaking Up (Your Project) May Be For the Best

A website redesign is a big undertaking, just as designing a new website is. But with a redesign, you also need to be mindful of not interfering with how the existing site is performing in searches. Brendan Chard cautions that “When you have a website that’s large, generating leads and with high search rankings, it’s a very delicate thing to update that website.”

If there are significant changes to content, URLs, meta tags, or site structure without the proper planning, it can cause a drop in search result visibility and a reduction in organic traffic. In other words, you’ve got a shiny new website open for business—but the business isn’t materializing. 

In a way, a website redesign for a substantial existing site is like a game of pick-up sticks or Jenga. The challenge isn’t removing a piece from the pile; it’s doing so in a way that doesn’t bring everything crashing down. 

In the end, for our own redesign, we wound up breaking the project into phases. Phase 1, which we recently completed, was focused on launching The Modern Firm’s new brand and design with cleaner, faster, better code (in a way that didn’t disrupt Google rankings.) We haven’t yet made big content or structure changes. That’s coming, but we want to make those changes thoughtfully and strategically, in a way that preserves what’s working well about the site. 

The lesson here is simply that what works for our established website may work well for our clients, too. A complete website redesign for an established website is incredibly complex; breaking the project up into phases may be better tailored for a law firm’s overall goals. It may be tempting to want to change everything all at once, but proceed with caution. As Brendan points out, “Don’t let ‘perfect’ get in the way of progress…it’s better to just keep moving forward.” Steady, incremental process will get you to your goal. 

The good news is, we are living proof that it works! Since completion of the first phase of our redesign, we have noticed an immediate and significant uptick in leads, and we’re delighted with our new logo and look. 

Bonus Lesson: The First Step is the Hardest

If you’ve been thinking about a redesign for your law firm website, ask yourself: how long have you been thinking about it? Chances are, it’s been a while. Actually talking about it with a website design company makes it real—and energizes you to take action. Don’t worry; we’ll be with you every step of the way. Contact The Modern Firm to get started.