Website builder
Website builder for law firms
Practice areas, the people, and a way to make contact — without the stock photograph of a gavel.
A law firm's website is judged on restraint. The failure mode is not ugliness, it is a page that looks like it was assembled by someone who has never met a client.
Describe the practice — the areas, the partners, the tone — and the site is generated to match, including the tone: "serious and calm, nothing flashy" produces a different result from "approachable and modern".
What they came for
What people want from a law firm website
Four questions a visitor arrives with. Everything below is what the generated page does about them.
Do you handle this kind of matter?
Practice areas as real sections rather than a dropdown of twenty words, so somebody with an employment problem sees the sentence about employment and stops looking.
Who would I be dealing with?
The people section, with a photograph and a line each. In a firm this size the partners are the product, and a stock photograph of a gavel is not.
Are these people serious?
The restraint is the message. Colour, type and motion are generated from how you describe the practice, so "calm, nothing flashy" produces a calm page rather than a template's idea of professional.
How do I make the first approach?
An enquiry form that asks for enough to route the matter and no more, arriving as an email and kept as a record in your dashboard.
Common problems
What tends to go wrong on law firm websites
Three patterns that come up often. None of them is a design problem, and each is a sentence or two of work to fix.
Stock photography of gavels and scales
Stock legal imagery — gavels, scales, columns — describes the category rather than the firm. Photographs of the people and the office are specific to you.
Practice areas as a list of nouns
A list of one-word areas asks the reader to work out which one covers their problem. A sentence under each, in plain words, does that for them.
No people on the page
For a small firm, knowing who you will be dealing with is part of the decision. Names and photographs answer it.
What gets built
What a law firm website needs
The sections Sitemo plans for law firms, in the order it puts them on the page.
The opening screen
The first screen: a photograph of the real place, the name, and the one thing you want a visitor to do next.
Services
What you sell, with prices. A list when there are many, cards with photographs when there are a few.
The facts people decide on
The handful of facts a visitor decides on — walk-ins welcome, open Sundays, free parking, fully insured.
Testimonials
Room for the reviews you already have. Your words from your customers — nothing invented to fill the space.
Your story
The short version of why the place exists, in your voice rather than a company profile.
FAQ
The questions you answer on the phone all day, answered once on the page.
Contact form
An enquiry that reaches you as an email and is kept as a record you can open later.
The ask
The line that asks for the call, the booking or the visit.
Not a fixed list. Sitemo decides which of these your site actually needs from what you describe — a law firm with four things to sell gets a different page from one with forty.
Underneath the page
And the parts that aren't pages
Most law firms need somewhere to keep this. It comes with the site rather than being a plugin you go and find.
Each one is a table you edit in your dashboard — change a price, add a service, take something off the list — and the published site follows. Enquiries arrive as an email and are kept as records you can search later, so nothing is lost because an inbox was busy.
The words
The same line, written twice
A general version of a line and a specific one, both about the same length. The difference is how much a visitor can do with it.
General
“We provide a comprehensive range of legal services to businesses and individuals.”
Specific
“Employment law for people who have been dismissed, and property work for small landlords. Two partners, both of whom you will meet.”
The first describes a category of work; the second describes a client with a problem.
General
“Contact us to arrange a consultation.”
Specific
“First call is twenty minutes, no charge, and you'll speak to a partner rather than an assistant.”
It answers the two questions most first enquiries carry: the cost, and who picks up.
The prices and areas above are made-up examples; what is being shown is the shape of the sentence. Yours go in the box below, and the site is written from them.
Try it
Describe your law firm
This is the same box that's on the home page, filled in with the example above. Change it to yours.
Free to try · No credit card · Your site stays exportable
Questions
Websites for law firms
- Can I control how formal it looks?
- Yes. Colour, typography and the restraint of the motion are chosen from how you describe the practice, and all of it can be adjusted in the editor afterwards.
- Can I have a page per practice area?
- Yes. Ask in chat — "give employment law its own page" — and the page is created with content on it, and the navigation and footer links are updated across the site.
- Who owns the site?
- You do, and you can export it. The published site compiles to real components and stylesheets you can download and host elsewhere; there is no lock-in as a business model.
- Can I keep the enquiry form from collecting more than it should?
- Yes, and you should — the fields are yours to choose, so an enquiry can take a name, a matter type and a way to reply without becoming a file you'd rather not be holding.
- Can I review the copy before anyone sees it?
- Yes. Generating a site does not publish it. The draft is yours to edit for as long as you like, and publishing is a separate, deliberate click.
- Can I roll back a change I don't like?
- Yes. Chat edits are applied as checkpoints, so "undo the last change" is a real operation rather than retyping what was there before.
Where this isn't the right tool
There is no client portal, no document exchange and no matter management here — and for privileged material, that is the right answer. Sitemo builds the public site: practice areas, the people, and an enquiry that collects only what it should.