I spearheaded the revamp of a leading San Diego law firm that increased their site traffic by 35% and page engagement by 31%.
Founded in San Diego, in 1992, Vaage Law is an award winning law firm. They are known for representing injured victims in highly complex medical fraud and battery cases, product liability cases, major car and truck crashes, and cases involving violations of civil rights.
The 2020 pandemic made it imperative for them to have a great digital presence, and they approached me and my team at Obu Interactive to revamp their website and branding.
At first glance, the website appeared basic with non-relevant imagery. People's initial impressions were that they were a self help website! Unfortunately, the more we looked, the more errors we found.
During the website audit, Google Analytics showed poor traffic on almost all the pages and reassured what the client said: No leads coming in from the website.
Furthermore, the team and I noticed that their current visitors were different than the law firm’s ideal target audience.
It was apparent we had to create a branding strategy and look to attract the right target audience. Hence we set 3 goals to create story and connection between the site and Vaage's potential clients.
#1 - Improve the website's user experience and look and feel.
#2 Increase traffic and lead generation.
#3 Create an authentic brand story to improve credibility and trust.
Interviews with potential and past customers, helped us realized that the existing website was lacking a lot of the information and support. For example:
• Customers didn't know the expertise of Vaage, other law firms young lawyers
• Lawyers and law firms didn't know how to refer a case to Vaage
• Young lawyers didn't know Vaage likes to mentor young upcoming lawyers
With this in mind we analyzed our competitors and realized that many of them provided critical information such as areas of expertise but they were salesy and tacky. Keen to not give of the same impression, we set out to revamp the way people discover information on the website.
Keeping the firm's request to still keep the gold and blue theme, I tweaked the saturation of the colors to increase contrast and introduced a red color for key call to action buttons on the website.
With the colors and new branding finalized we began to work on putting together our typography styles and ensuring we had buttons for primary, secondary, and tertiary actions.
We spent a lot of time ensuring our new style guide gave the impression that Va law firm that is accessible, trustworthy, and reliable.
To improve the credibility of the website, we conducted a professional photoshoot with the law firm and their staff for all the critical pages of the website.
Below is the look at the new website and all the improvements we made
The previous navigation made users believe that Vaage Law only specialized in personal injury cases. However, this was not the case!
To solve this, I added a mega menu dropdown that linked to all the different practice areas of the firm. And also added a way for users to refer a case and schedule a consultation.
A key insight we discovered from our research was that many victims didn't always know where to seek information and counsel for their plights.
Hence we introduced dedicated pages for practice areas such as brain injury, elder abuse, car accidents, etc. These pages would share with them success stories, laws regarding the practice area, and provide a way for them to get in touch.
As a leading firm it was important to establish expertise in different legal domains. Hence we created a gallery of positive results the Vaage team had got over the years.
Websites covering trending topics are a great way to generate traffic which can convert into leads. Hence we introduced a blog that allowed the Vaage team to make posts about trending legal topics such as changes in the laws.
A key value of Vaage Law is to give back to the legal community. As part of that we created a page through which future lawyers could seek mentorship from their team.
Our SEO analysis made us realize that Vaage Law receives a lot of mobile traffic. Hence we ensured we optimized the website to look great on mobile devices as well.
Page Views
Page Engagement
The results speak for themselves. The website has a better flow, and the pages are easy to find and access. The new color palette gives a more credible and professional look; the CTAs stand out to get the user’s attention. No more cheesy stock images; The team and I enhanced storytelling to focus on the actual target audience to increase their leads and traffic on the site.
Feedback on the design? Want to chat over coffee about building a brand or responsive website from scratch? Feel free to get in touch or schedule a chat.
While at VIIZR, I spearheaded the end-to-end QuickBooks integration journey, from comprehensive research studies to orchestrating the entire design process, all while collaborating closely with the engineering team to bring efficiency to small businesses.
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