Your website should be a reflection of your expertise and authority while adequately demonstrating your brand to a broad audience.
The design of your website accounts for 95% of a user’s first impression, which means that a good-looking website can play a role in growing your law firm’s customer base. This is why it is vital to adopt emerging web design trends into your marketing strategy.
Incorporating modern web design elements into your site allows you to showcase your professionalism and expertise. In addition, an easy-to-use and clean website will always create a great first impression with visitors, encouraging them to learn more about your legal practice.
But for 2022, what modern website design trends and techniques are on the horizon, and as a law firm, how can you leverage them to revive your website?
User-Experience Web Design Trends To Implement in 2022
Today, website functionality is about user experience and how prospective clients will engage with your domain. It is also about ensuring that your customers understand how to navigate through the content page and menu item on your website, which builds your law firm’s online presence.
With law firm practical web design trends, you can establish a website that generates quality leads and drive conversions.
Effective Mobile Design Layout
A majority of people use smartphones today and prefer them for using the Internet over desktops and laptops. This necessitates an effective and optimized mobile design layout for the website.
While potential clients search for an expert attorney, you can orient your specific law firm site to match their particular method.
This trend is crucial for any law firm that wants to be at the leading edge of legal digital marketing. Therefore, as a law firm, you must cater to Samsung, Apple, and other mobile devices visitors use to provide a seamless experience.
For instance, long scrolls break the continuity of a good user experience and bog them down with endless pages of cluttered information that is improbable to convince them. This gives prospective clients a reason to forget your law firm while turning to an attorney with a functional website. In addition, it is also vital to prioritize your site’s page load times when considering website functionality. A maximum-resolution and intricate design layout can kill these.
Easy-To-Use Navigation
Having straightforward desktop and mobile website navigation is yet another trend you should focus on for your site as a law firm. Simple navigation makes it easy to understand once the visitors first encounter your site.
Web design trends have common navigation elements that your customers will expect, irrespective of the site they visit. Therefore, a practical law firm website should meet all such expectations by enabling digital navigation important to potential clients.
While modern aesthetic designs for websites mostly break the mold, clarity and straightforwardness cannot and shouldn’t be compromised in the process. In the same way, place your professional experience in the legal industry, service information, consultation forms, and content marketing posts in locations that visitors are familiar with.
Also, it is imperative to ensure that you simplify navigational tools like dropdowns and menus and make your CTAs (calls to action) prominent. That way, you don’t have to teach your prospective clients how to access your law firm site to learn about your brand.
Law Firm Aesthetic Website Layout Trends
When it comes to an aesthetic website design for a law firm, impressing the visitors with aesthetics and catching viewers’ eye is crucial for converting traffic into quality leads and, ultimately, your customers.
Law firms with obsolete websites will be left behind in this new wave of web design trends. However, your legal services and profession’s aesthetic layout is just as vital to the life of your customized website as the published content, which proves the power of first impressions.
Minimalist Design
The reduction of images and information accompanied by a significant quantity of negative space creates an online setting that makes it easy for users to navigate seamlessly. While establishing to your potential clients that your specific firm exists today due to the advanced aesthetic, you can quickly gain and build their trust.
Minimalism in web designs for certified law firms focuses on simplifying site navigation and demonstrating practice info in an approachable manner.
From a practical standpoint, minimalism means crisp and clean web design. It doesn’t depend a lot on bold colors and complex graphics to draw and grab visitors’ attention. Additionally, it doesn’t use excessive text. Its clear-cut, bare, and communicates a concise, simple message in a credible and emphatic way.
While simplicity has always been a crucial trend as it portrays a classic look, it will be becoming even more popular in web design for law firms too.
Modular Layout
In addition to minimalist design, modular layouts will be becoming a popular web design trend leveraged by law firms to enable straightforward navigation on their website’s home pages. For example, “boxes” are differentiated by geometrical rectangles, and shading helps the logical information flow by sorting out every topic into its space.
Instead of being overwhelmed by paragraph blocks, they’ll be able to easily understand your content quicker and have the opportunity to skim it effectively. For instance, if they don’t have much time to scan the entire page, visitors will still be able to retain critical elements of your law firm brand through modular design.
Dynamic Scrolling
Dynamic scrolling is yet another web design layout trend for law firms. This is a technique that adds energy and movement to your website.
It’s not like static attorney websites filled with text that does nothing to enhance the visitor experience. Instead, this aesthetic enhances the appearance of images and graphics and changes backgrounds compared to still objects.
Both types of dynamic scrolling offer a unique flair to your legal site’s design, making your firm stand out from the rest of your competition, instantly catching the eyes of prospective clients.
Performance
In the upcoming years, website developers will focus on maximizing a website’s efficiency and performance.
As a law firm, it is essential to make optimal use of responsive designs, collapsible menus, and negative space while leveraging comprehensible fonts and ensuring all their links are working correctly.
Security Controls
Security is one of the most critical facets of web design trends that will continue to be the utmost priority for law firms. With various browsers cracking down on on-site security, it is essential to prioritize visitors’ data safety.
For instance, on Google Chrome, a site that doesn’t have a security certificate, “HTTPS” is generally labeled “not secure” in the URL bar. Some sites are even blocked altogether because of the lack of security.
As a result, web developers will also need to obtain their security certificates so that their search engine performance and rankings are not adversely affected.
Brand Storytelling
While many people take brand storytelling as a content marketing endeavor, it considerably impacts a website’s design. Your website design should help you convey to visitors and potential clients why your specific law firm exists, what inspires your team of attorneys to work competently, and the kind of services and benefits your company can offer clients.
Cinemagraphs Technology
As mentioned earlier, the user experience will play a critical role in ranking a website in search engine results. Therefore, this aspect will be of utmost importance for the website developers and designers to consider.
Using interactive elements such as Cinemagraphs can help you better evoke appreciation, emotion, and credibility.
Cinemagraphs give modern, incredible elements to your site that complement the advanced website design for law firms. Also, this trend uses high-quality videos and images with subtle motion and unbroken loop.
Moreover, it also gives the visitors an immersive experience, keeping them occupied for a more significant period. Finally, such an immersive experience encourages visitors to explore more about your particular law firm and ask for their specific case evaluation if they require legal help.
Usage Of Serif Fonts
Sans-serif fonts have become an unspoken rule amongst web developers and designers. However, as screen resolutions improve radically, it is no longer necessary to use this font.
Because this font has almost become obsolete, web designers prefer to use the serif font to communicate more authority and professionalism. This is what your law firm website depicts.
Of the various serif fonts that you can select from, the most commonly used are Freight Text, Casino, Garamond, and Minion. However, whatever available serif fonts you use in your law firm site, ensure that you first preview it on a small screen before you finally go ahead with it. And it should look clear, crisp, and easy to understand. You can also use sans-serif and serif in combination.
Videos
Leveraging videos on sites is not something new, and it has been around for quite some time now. This creates a relatively better impact on any other design element.
However, it is vital to use it judiciously, if possible more on your service pages and home page. Videos enable the viewers to disperse the textual content and expand the page layout.
Additionally, it improves user experience significantly, making it easier to engage and interact with your potential customers. And, of course, it improves your search engine rankings.
Also, micro animation is a trend that is increasing in many law firm website designs as using micro-animation helps to captivate user attention. Micro animation is a small visual cue that catches the user’s attention. For instance, if an individual brings the cursor near your law firm’s logo, it grows bigger and may even change colors or form.
It is specifically helpful when the screen size is small, which is the case as over 60% of searches occurs on mobile devices. So, you can use this function to direct the visitor around your site.
Animation feature is becoming more popular for websites. For example, scroll-triggered animations are trendy, similar to animations triggered by links and menus. But make sure these animations don’t interfere with or compromise the performance of the website. These animations can add a feeling of modernity and professionalism.
Wrapping Up
You can run an effective and optimized law firm website that appeals to more clients with the right approach. Also, it will help them convince as to why they should opt for your legal services. Choose a proper layout where you can place the information prominently and target your client base.
