A custom law firm website design powered by WordPress.

Since 2003 we have been regarded as the best law firm website design company in Toronto. Over the better part of two decades, we have worked with many law firms across Canada to breathe new life into tired website user interface designs and learn how to optimize their website for and compete in organic search.

Working with the marketing and communications team at McMillan LLP was a truly fantastic experience and involved more than 30 individuals all working together to bring the new website to life. Understanding that this project would be a labour of love, we set to work nearly three years before the official launch to research the firm’s existing digital marketing and search engine footprint. This research would serve as the foundation for building a project plan that would support the new website in the future and stay true to our goals throughout the lengthy redesign process.

Law Firm Website Design Goals

Digital brand refresh – with a custom typeface and strong colour palette available under the McMillan brand, we worked with the marketing team to redefine and modernize the digital branding to cross both web and print media, beginning with the new website.
Branded website user interface design – after more than ten years of applying updates and patchwork to the firm’s website, it was high time to start fresh and design an ownable website user interface that could easily adapt to growing marketing needs for years to come.
Custom WordPress development – with a plan to publish articles, announcements, webinars and other various content regularly, a content management system powerful and flexible enough to handle more than 7,000 pages across three different languages was required.
Systems integration – behind the scenes the new website would require custom integrations with a payment gateway to process client payments, an email marketing platform and various other document creation tools to generate digital files on the fly both publicly and within the private staff portal.
Search Engine Optimization – to power the firm’s digital marketing plans from 2021 and beyond, technical SEO and content marketing strategies were developed and woven into the design and development process.

The Website Design Process

Discovery and Research

The most crucial phase of our law firm website design process is the discovery phase. The research our web designers conduct in the early stages of the project informs all decisions that will follow, including information architecture, user interface design and web development.

Before our expert design team can consider any other aspect of the new website, we must understand who we’re designing the new website. Additionally, it is essential to understand how people will use the website to achieve various goals and what technologies they are using to access the website. Further, we must also thoroughly understand what the top competitors bring to the table both in design and search engine marketing.

Using this research, our web design team builds a successful strategy to help our clients make informed decisions about their new website’s structure and information architecture. We’re firm believers in providing our clients with the most information possible to include them in the design process and take ownership of the project right out of the gate. Working together with our clients in this collaborative manner, we can help them achieve their marketing goals and understand how research, experience, and a thorough understanding work together to deliver the final product.

Sitemap Design

The design of the new site map is the first key deliverable in the web design process. It serves as an exercise to establish the website navigation design and understand where each page will live within the new website. Before approaching user experience design, mapping out the navigational system allows us to address any navigational pain points within the previous website architecture to ensure they’re not carried over to the new website.

Wireframe Design

Once the site map design is completed and approved by project stakeholders, we tackle the wireframe design. Also known as user experience or UX design, wireframes are the first tangible deliverable in the website design process. Wireframing allows us to build out each unique page type or layout in a simple blueprint style that is void of design elements like imagery, colour and custom fonts. Without high fidelity design elements, it is much faster to make adjustments and test out experiential design ideas while avoiding the distraction of UI design.

Wireframes are uploaded into our best-in-class interactive prototyping tool that allows decision-makers and stakeholders to experience the page layouts in full context, whether it’s the desktop or mobile environment. Viewing the UX design in an environmental context allows everyone to make the most educated decisions that will impact the user journey and page architecture in the creative design phase.

Custom User Interface Design

First impressions are everything.

Creative Web Design

Once all stakeholders have signed off on the information architecture and wireframe design, it’s time to dive into the creative web design phase – always everyone’s favourite part of the process. Leaning on months of research and strategy development, our law firm web designers begin to shape the wireframe design into high fidelity user interfaces.

Weaving the new digital branding throughout every unique layout and interactive element is paramount to creating a professional law firm website that communicates quickly and efficiently with its intended audience. Funnelling each different user type to their optimized conversion point relies on the combination of UX design and polished UI design.

Taking special care to hand-craft the best law firm website design with a balance of imagery and colour mixed with branded fonts and typographic elements ensures that the final product is clean, concise and efficient in conveying the marketing message defined by the firm.

Custom WordPress Development

Our Toronto web developers specialize in custom WordPress websites crafted from a single pixel. We do not use any templates or pre-built frameworks within our custom web design services, meaning that our highly experienced WordPress developers hand-code every single website element from the ground up. This process ensures we offer our clients a tailored website and content management system that provides the specific tools and administrative options married with the unique front-end design aesthetic to power their digital marketing.

Working with WordPress for nearly 20 years has afforded our development team the in-depth knowledge and experience to take the world’s most powerful CMS to new heights with each deployment. By eliminating unnecessary tools and fluff, we simplify the website management experience for our clients and ensure that they reap every benefit a custom WordPress website has to offer.

Before releasing the beta website for client review, we add website content and run the site through our SEO checklist to ensure all pages are optimized for organic search, and the website meets AODA compliance.

Before public launch, we stage the website for at least 48 hours are scour the site in a final quality assurance check to iron out any last-minute wrinkles. With final approval from the law firm, we schedule launch day beginning bright and early at 4 am!

What our client had to say...

Doing good work for good people.

“I’ve been in business for about 20 years and I usually deal with about 30 different vendors a year. I can honestly say Parachute is the most professional, fantastic, client-centric vendor I’ve ever worked with. They are extremely calm, cool, and collected with an amazing ability to patiently explain things throughout the project. Working on a high stakes project like this with a lot of time, money, and voices involved, it was great to have Parachute to defer to for guidance.”

National Portfolio Director: McMillan LLP

Custom Integrations and Functionality

On the surface, the new website appears large and content-rich, but clear and simple to navigate through. What most visitors will never realize is the amount of customization living just under the hood working seamlessly with the WordPress CMS to deliver a rich experience.

The Vuture email marketing platform is integrated in both English and French to collect and manage email subscriptions and allow users to control their own email preferences right down to the type of content they wish to receive.

A private client payment portal integrated with the popular Moneris payment processing platform is tucked away to provide the firm’s clients with the convenience of paying their invoices online. This integration goes on to share payment status information with the firm’s in-house account management software to ensure the accountants have real-time access to payment and account status.

Throughout the website, both publicly and privately document creation software is integrated within the CMS to allow website users to generate PDF or Word documents of the firm’s profiles, services and publications on the fly. These assets can be downloaded to the user’s machine for consumption at their convenience.

The law firm’s website also features a private staff portal that houses an internal staff directory and firm information. The portal also includes document creation services for staff members to easily draw assets from the website at their convenience.

Responsive Website Design

Future-proofing the marketing engine.

A Mobile-first Approach

With this website design and digital marketing overhaul, McMillan drastically improved their organic search engine footprint by taking a mobile-first approach. With Google’s emphasis on mobile indexing, our team worked with the firm’s marketing department to carefully analyze historical web analytics records and build a winning responsive design strategy.

Mobile First Website Design for Law Firms

Website Launch

We launch all websites early in the morning to allow the DNS switchover and final deployment tasks time to propagate before the regular workday begins and traffic increases on the website. In this particular case, we decided to begin deployment even earlier – at 4 am – to accommodate more than 7,000 pages of content in three different languages, numerous highly customized backend tools and thousands of 301 redirects. Coordinating a site this vast requires experience and patience. Having both under our belt, the decision to launch in the early morning hours made the most sense and provided peace of mind for everyone involved.

Following a successful launch day, we enter into the final phase of our web design process that we call Manage and Grow. During this post-launch period, we offer a full 60-days of complimentary website support and software maintenance, including WordPress core software and plugin updates, security monitoring and patches, performance monitoring, and any bug fixes within scope.

WordPress Training and SEO Best Practices

Before officially handing over the keys to the new law firm website, we schedule an interactive CMS demo to walk the marketing and content team through the various website management tools and everyday scenarios that they can expect to encounter once they take over the website.

We also cover best practices for search engine optimization and image and media optimization practices to ensure the website and database are neat and tidy to meet top performance standards.

This demo is recorded and made available as a downloadable asset for the firm to store locally to train new team members or provide a quick refresher when needed.

About Parachute Design

Parachute Design has helped law firms and other professional service providers revamp and revitalize their websites and digital branding since 2003. Our years of experience offer our clients the very best law firm website design services and optimization techniques. Our web design agency is widely recognized as an industry leader for our ability to weave unbridled creativity and functionality into powerful marketing tools.

Contact our web design company at 416-901-8633 or complete our proposal planner to learn more about our law firm website design experience and how we can help take your firm to the next level.

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