Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog
Redesigning Your Website is Important in Law Firm Marketing
Did you know that 68% of marketers did a website redesign in the last 12 months and they spent a median of $10,000 doing so, according to Hubspot's Science of Website Redesign. This belies the myth that a major law firm has to spend north of $50,000 to revamp their website.
What's more, only about half of website redesign projects finish and launch on time, according to the data, and 1/3 of marketers were not happy with their last website redesign. The data came from surveys of 100+ consumers, 100+ marketers and 100+ agencies.
"Most people think you should redesign your website every one to two years," according to Mike Volpe CMO of Hubspot. "Your website should be a living, breathing, chaning being. Edit and improve it constantly."
55% of the time the marketing team initiates the idea for a website redesign, although the CEO starts it 30% of the time. As to who actually undertakes the redesign:
- 44% of website owners hired an outside company for the majority of the project.
- 53% did the maority of the project internally.
- Satisfaction with the results was the same whether the work was outsources or handled in-house.
It generally takes 4 to 5 months to redesign a website. Lightning speed is one month but it can take up to two years, as many law firm marketeres know.
Good and Bad Metrics
How can you tell if the redesign was successful. Here are some better metrics:
- Visitors
- Leads
- Sales
- Conversion %
- All of the above, but by source
Worse Metrics
- Bounce rate
- Time on site
- Page views
- Pages / visit
- "Hits"
- Google Pagerank
The key takeaway is that what visitors want most is a website that is easy to use -- not Flash, fancy design or artwork. Find out more about website redesigns that get marketing results.
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From a cost perspective, I think this is incredibly misleading. Importantly, this is a survey of marketers across a really broad range of industries, which include small companies and nonprofits that were able to perform website redesigns (likely with mixed results) on shoestring budgets and therefore skewing the data. Hubspot's customers are often small businesses that leverage Hubspot's tools to support initiatives that they can't support internally. Given the significant amount of content housed within the websites of firms even outside the AmLaw 200 and the type of CMS needed to power a site of that scale, anyone that tries to convince you that a law firm website can be done for anything even remotely close to $10,000 is either lying or crazy.
If you are talking about a complete redesign, including design, information architecture and UX (a must for that much content), development and testing you will absolutely have to spend north of $50k. However, if you have a solid design and infrastructure in place from the beginning, this process is much more manageable and much less costly. I also think that bounce rate and time on site are very important as they tell you whether or not people have any interest on what you put there. If you have a practice group description that requires a lot of scrolling (which most firms do) and time on page is low while exit rates are high, you have a problem.
Angela, actually I found the Hubspot information totally accurate. I've helped more than 100 law firms redesign their websites -- and I've helped them do so for as little as $3,000.
There are thousands of web developers and the software is very mature, so there is no reason to re-invent the coding process for each site. A developer can create a robust database-driven site with lots of interactive features for under $10,000, easily.
I've conducted RFPs for many law firms when they've sought bids from developers. I've seen proposals as high as $150,000, which were a total ripoff. When developers are asked to compete, you can easily get a new website for $10,000 or less.