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 small budget, here are three possible design resources:

1. You can buy a low-cost website template at http://www.templatemonster.com/ and have http://www.templatetuning.com/ customize it to add your text, personal photos, and any stock photos you purchase cheaply (at a service like http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php or http://www.bigstockphoto.com/). Template tuning's rates vary, but plan on spending around $1000 to get off the ground.

2. http://www.squarespace.com - offers a set of "building blocks" you can use to assemble your own template and create your own site, including a blog. You can get started for $8 per month - I'd suggest you begin with a home page, a service page, a bio page, and a website privacy policy (required by California and New York law). As your site becomes more elaborate and you attract more visitors, you can expand on your site's features, number of pages, and bandwidth (essentially, the total file size, usually measured in megabytes or gigabytes of data, of all the content -- text, images, audio, etc. -- that you deliver to your total visitors in a month); price then goes up in increments to $50 per month. Be sure to copy each page of text and all your images, audio, video, blog entries, and other content onto your own computer - you may have to save it piece-by-piece as opposed to page-by-page. But then you'll be able to repurpose all that content if you ever want to move your site to another hosting service - otherwise, if you discontinue your SquareSpace contract, you will lose everything you've created.

3. If you're a do-it-yourself'er, comfortable with the web, and would like the ability to easily update and expand your own site, you might want to buy a domain name and purchase database hosting (see below) and pay Interspire $450 to install Website Manager -- see http://www.interspire.com/websitepublisher/ -- on your site. You can then create your site (and a blog if you want), and easily change and add to it when you wish. You can also hire a professional website designer to create some custom templates for you to use with the Website Manager system - shop for website designers, database programmers, and other web professionals at http://www.elance.com .

B.   Low-cost Website Hosting

A website needs a hosting service to make it available to the public. I recommend business linux hosting, which includes a database and a lot of features, from http://enginehosting.com, 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 will not be easily accessible by 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, which I use and like. They're cheap, have great phone support, and make it easy to manage your domain name online, so you can easily attach it to your website.

D. Links to Social Media

It's possible for an experienced designer to incorporate social media, such as Twitter and your Facebook profile, right into your website, although it takes some time. I don't recommend doing this though. The average visitor to your site will only view 3 pages before contacting you, bookmarking your site, or leaving your site for good. Do you want that visitor to spend their 5 minutes on the pages where you carefully explain the benefits of using your legal services, or spend that limited time looking at who you've friended on Facebook and reading your random-thoughts Twitter feed? I thought so.