How important is your email address?

Companies spend thousands of dollars making sure their logo, company colors, message and image are consistently and professionally represented.

One area that seems to be overlooked is the importance of your email address being consistent with your firm. New lawyers and lawfirms starting out are signing up for free email accounts, (ie:Gmail,Yahoo, etc.) as their business email, instead of using an email address with their firm's website name. Many people will add a second “business” email to an existing personal account. Free email addresses say: I’m new, I’m small and I’m cheap; which is usually not the image a law firm wants to project. 

Websites mirror the image of a law firm; many times with the firm name as the website and/or domain name. To maintain a consistent professional image of your law firm, your email address should be the same as your website address. Christine@mylawfirm.com, has a more professional image than mylawfirm@gmail.com. 

Spammers have software that crawls websites searching for email addresses, and "contact" and "info" and two used most often and receive the highest spam.  Select a name for your catch-all email address to be something less common, and use a alias email address on your website to deter spam.

This shows not only a level of professionalism, but also assures your client on a subliminal level, that you really are with the firm. With growth of email scams, this one little area may make a huge difference to the very prospective client you are attempting to reach.

Most website packages come with a minimum of at least one email address, which your webmaster could have forwarded to your free or aol address if you only want one area to check emails. This way it can still be convenient for you, yet show the most professional image for your law firm, large or small.

We placed a poll on a previous blog and the results seem to say the same thing:

How important is it to your professional image to have a business email address (yourname@yourbusinessname.com) instead of a free email address.

Essential 48%
Very Important 25%
Not Important 7%
No Difference 11%
Don’t know 9%

This is something to consider in your overall branding plan.

Popular Design Mistakes on Websites & Social Media Pages

The importance of having a professional internet presence grows each day as more attorneys place their law firm profiles and websites on the internet.

Designing a productive website and social media image is more than just putting text on the internet. Effective web designers and internet marketers have experienced why certain components are important in making your sites both visitor and SEO friendly.

Some of the glaring errors that show up too often, which make your website or your social network pages appear to be unprofessional, include:

(1) Using text in your images, or using images only instead of text. This makes your text hard to read on certain browsers and your content cannot be indexed or searched, therefore not search engine friendly.

(2) Using text that is under 9pt in size. If its too hard to read – people won’t even try.

(3) Your links aren't clearly labeled, don't tell your visitors where they'll end up. The only say "Click Here."

(4) Inconsistent navigation. Different navigation layout on every page simply confuses your visitor.

(5) Too many colors, too many sizes and too may font designs in the same text area.

(6) Too many typos. An occasional typo is usually accepted, however, having someone other than the designer proofread for spelling, grammar, capitalization and content is time and money well spent.

(7) Background graphics or solid backgrounds that don't contrast well against the text, making it hard to read.

(8) Dead links, link rot and/or no 404 pages. Custom 404 pages help you to maintain visitors that typed one of your page names in error, or clicked on a dead link in your site. Your custom 404 page should appear consistent with your site image and have the same navigational links to help your visitor find their way to the live page they are looking for. 

(9) Contact pages without live email addresses or contact forms. If you visitor is looking to contact you via email, make it easy for them by making your email a live link, instead of text in a static graphic. Fill in forms are handy to help them tell you what they need, and to protect your email one more level away from being harvaested by spammers (this is no guarantee however and spammer software continues to get more sophisticated.)

10) Low content. Original content and content that answers your visitors questions will set your website above the rest. If your website is a simple one page bio, then it still needs to answer the question - why the visitor should contact you. 


Plan your branding strategy. Design your website from the perspective of your prospective client and their needs. You can have a simple design and still deliver a professional image.