Forte Solicitors Website Design

The problem

1. 01

   The visitor arrives mid-crisis

   Nobody looks for an asset recovery lawyer out of interest. They look because money has gone somewhere they cannot reach, and they are frightened and in a hurry. A site that opens with a paragraph about the firm's heritage loses them before it has said anything useful.

2. 02

   Nine practice areas is a lot to hold

   Real estate, asset tracing, litigation, due diligence, corporate, business advisory, wills and probate, family law, oil and gas. Presented as nine equal tiles it reads as a firm that does everything and therefore nothing in particular. The architecture had to make the range read as depth rather than as dilution.

3. 03

   Legal websites all say the same words

   Strategic, trusted, committed to excellence. Every firm's homepage is interchangeable, which means none of them are persuading anyone. The differentiator had to be specificity, not adjectives.

4. 04

   A firm is bought through its people

   For work this sensitive, the decision is rarely about the firm. It is about whether there is a real lawyer, with a real record, who is going to take the call. That is hard to convey and easy to fake, so it had to be built out of things a visitor can check.

What I did

1. 01

   Positioning

   The headline names the work rather than the virtue: your trusted legal partner in asset recovery, due diligence investigation, property law, litigation and corporate advisory. It is long for a headline, deliberately. A visitor in trouble is scanning for their own situation, and the fastest way to be found is to say the thing.

2. 02

   Information architecture

   Five pages, each with one job: home, about, practice areas, our team, insights, plus contact. The practice areas page carries the weight, with all nine areas set out in order rather than hidden behind a menu, so the range is legible in one scroll.

3. 03

   Naming every service

   Under each practice area sits the list of what it actually covers, sixty-six services in all. Title verification and search reports. Perfection of titles and deeds of assignment. Domestic and international asset tracing. These are the phrases people type and the phrases people recognise, and a paragraph that gestures at them is worth far less than a list that names them.

4. 04

   The team page as proof

   Five lawyers, each with a name, a role and where relevant the year they were called to the Bar. Called to the Nigerian Bar in 2006 is checkable in a way that decades of combined experience is not, and on a site about recovering money, checkable is the whole point.

5. 05

   Design direction

   Near-black, warm gold and a Playfair Display headline, which reads as a senior firm without reaching for the marble columns and scales that every legal template ships with. Inter for everything a person has to actually read, at a size that holds up on a phone.

6. 06

   One call to action

   Book a consultation, in the header, in the hero, and at the end of the practice areas page. Not a contact form buried behind a menu item. A visitor who has just read their own problem described should never have to go looking for the next step.

7. 07

   Room for insights

   An insights section is built in from the start rather than bolted on later, because a firm with nine practice areas has nine subjects it can write about, and writing is how a law firm earns search traffic it is not paying for.

Key design decisions

• A headline that names five practice areas outright rather than a slogan, because a visitor in trouble is scanning for their own situation
• All nine practice areas on one page, in order, rather than behind a dropdown
• Sixty-six services named individually in the words clients use, not folded into descriptive paragraphs
• Lawyers named with their year of call, because a checkable fact outweighs a claim about experience
• Near-black and gold with Playfair Display, avoiding the scales-and-columns look every legal template ships with
• One call to action, book a consultation, repeated at each point where intent forms
• An insights section built in from the start, so the firm has somewhere to earn search traffic

Results

Built with

• Static HTML, hand-built
• No page builder and no CMS overhead
• Playfair Display and Inter, served from Google Fonts
• Responsive layouts down to phone width

My pricing starts at $ 1,500. See what each tier includes.

Services used here