The Breakdown: Website Basics with a Law Firm

The Inspiration

There are many business areas I could have focused on but a Law firm would be the theme for my next WordPress project. At the time when I was deciding a theme a friend of mine kept posting snaps about him studying for the BAR exam. I believe this subconsciously affected my choice.

This would be my quickest WordPress Site I completed. The first reason is instead of making a random website from scratch, this website was inspired by a real company. In previous projects I usually studied websites from similar business area and incorporated those features onto my own projects. For this projects I tried recreating the exact same site from The Lanier Law Firm’s official website.

Recreating a site would help compare my skills to a professional website. Note: To save myself some time I did just drag and drop some text from the official website to some of the clones pages. I did summarize some content but I soon realized this was very time consuming,

A second reason this site was quickly implemented was because I already knew the basic features a website should now include.

Lessons Learned

Different Pages

A website can be broken down into several pages:

• Home (Landing Page)
• About
• Team
• Practice Areas (Services)
• News (Blog Page)
• Contact

Home

The Home page is the first page a user will land in when first visiting your site. This page can be simple but it also can contain a summary of most of the content that can be found on your page. Having small pieces of information about different pages that are on your site allows users to see a little bit of everything instantly. This can help grab your user’s attention and keep them from leaving to another site.

About

The About page is a second page that describes the purpose of the site in more detail. Usually the purpose of a site is the same as a business’ main goals.

Team

The Team page can be included in the About page. But when the Team page is part of its own page, the Team Page can go into more details about individuals in the team.

Services

The Service page should describe what you can provide to a user. A webdesigner’s services will include designing and hosting a website. A lawyer’s website will offer the different legal practice areas that lawyer will focus in.

Blogs

A Blog section is not mandatory but it allows owners of websites to publish new content that will help future users revisit your site. These new posts can be information driven or news driven, It can be anything that adds content to your site.

Contact

A Contact page is just another location to place all your information in one place that allow users to reach you. This can include:

• a phone number
• an email
• a physical address
• and a contact form

A Contact form is important because it allows users to directly contact you through your own website. It also allows you to collect emails from your users. A list of emails are used in marketing campaigns. Many users can be easily contacted through email.

Page Sections

Each page can be broken down into 4 different sections

1. Header
2. Menu
3. Body
4. Footer

Header

A header is not always included but when it is it can include quick information to a user. Usually included in a header is some contact information and icons that link to social media accounts.

Menu

A menu is used as a location to include internal links of your site. A menu will list the most important pages contained within your site.

The body of a site will almost never be the same. The content is directly correlated to the purpose of the page.

Unlike the header the footer must always be included within a site. It is an area a user can scroll down to to quickly access specific information about your site. Some information that can be included in your footer are:

• contact information
• menus
• call to actions or summaries
• contact forms
• social media links
• Logo
• photo gallery
• copyright
• privacy policy
• terms of use
• sitemap

Check out my other blog posts or my other websites!