Principles of Attorney Web Design - Part 1

For many attorney web designers, myself included, the most intimidating part of the website design process is getting started. Imagine for a moment that you're sitting at your desk with nothing other than a cup of tea and the business card of a lawyer who needs a basic informational website. Usually, a business card speaks volumes about a law firm's identity, and could be used as design inspiration.

Unfortunately, that's not the case with some business cards. They can be in black and white, all text, no character, blah. Talk about a blank canvas! So, where do you go from here? You need a plan. With some critical input from the lawyer about what his law firm actually does, and by gathering information about the content you have to work with, you'll be able to come up with a successful layout and design.

Anyone, no matter what level of artistic talent he or she has, can come up with a design that works well and looks good- all it takes is a little experience and a working knowledge of some basic layout principles. The book from which this article is excerpted, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, covers each of these principles in turn, showing even the least design-oriented of us how to create beautiful, elegant, functional designs. So let's get started with the basics and before long you'll have the foundation necessary to design gallery-quality websites for attorneys and small law firms.

The Website Design Process

In a web programming book I read recently, the author introduced a fictional scenario to explain why readers needed to design a page layout and create a style sheet for the example application. He basically said that the company web designer was off getting inspiration from somewhere and wouldn't be back until later in the year. It sounded as if he was implying that designers are prone to flake out and go on vision quests for months at a time, but I'm going to assume the author made that comment in an endearing way, and introduce the same scenario.

Here are the hypothetical details of this scenario: John Jones, a laywer in Florida, needs a website. We have his law firm's business card and he's eager to get started. Unfortunately, the designer is out of town - wait, that's not a good excuse. Let's say he was injured during a freak dairy cow stampede while attending the South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin, Texas. Yeah, that's believable. Anyway, he's out for a few months, and you're on your own. So where do you start? The actual process of designing an entire website or web application includes a lot of steps, but the process of creating a design comp boils down to only two tasks: discovery and implementation.