Low-Cost Resources for Attorney Website Design

by Suuzen Ty Anderson, Esq.

A.   Low-cost Website Designers

If you're looking for a simple, brochure-style website, and you're on a smalll budget, here are four possible design resources:

1. You can buy a low-cost website template at http://www.templatemonster.com/ and have it customized to add your text at http://www.templatetuning.com/.

2. http://www.2tcwebs.com/webdesign.php - for $250, they'll put 5 pages of text into one of their stock templates, which average about $20 and are available at http://www.biz-plates.com/store/catalog/ . If you're a California attorney, you'll need a website privacy page, and a contact-us page, so this really only gives you a home page, a service page, and a bio page. They sell more pages for an additional cost, which they estimate upon request. I would suggest picking a simple template and disregarding the stock commercial photo they furnish. Then you can have them substitute one or more professional photos you license from a one-month membership source like http://www.photos.com/en/ or http://shutterstock.com/.

3. http://www.lawyersites.net offers very nice brochure-style template designs for a monthly fee of $40 to $80 including hosting, or for a one-time flat rate that runs between $300 - $900 (see http://www.lawyersites.net/purchases/items/purchase_website.html ) - the one-time price does not include hosting.

4. If you're a do-it-yourself'er, comfortable with the web, and would like the ability to update and expand your own site, you might want to try the SiteCenter system at http://www.interspire.com/sitecenter/ . For $239, you get your choice of templates; you can use them to create, change and add to your site when you wish (you'll still need hosting and a domain name). You can also hire a professional website designer to create some custom templates for you to use with the SiteCenter system - shop for website designers, database programmers, and other web professionals at http://www.elance.com/mp/cat/website-design/index.html .

B.   Low-cost Website Hosting

A website needs a hosting service to make it available to the public. I recommend business linux hosting from http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/HostingBus, at $9.99 per month.

C.  Domain Name Registration

You should always have your own domain name - that means your site name reads "YourName.com," not "YourName.DesignCompany.com." Never let someone like FindLaw or Lawyers.com post your website inside their site, because you can't ever move your site, you're stuck with their archaic restrictions, and your site has poor or no accessibility to search engines.

If you cancelled your website hosting contract without first obtaining a copy of the contents of your website, you may still be able to locate and copy your old website's text and photos from the WayBack Machine at http://www.archive.org/ - a free library of the older and newer versions of many websites.

I recommend registering your domain name with 1and1.com. If you purchase business website hosting from this company for $9.99 per month, you can register up to three domain names with them at the same time, at no charge for the first year's registration.