Module 3 · Plan every page
The pages a firm actually needs
Stage 2 begins. Before a single page is built, you decide which pages exist — and a small firm’s site is about ten to fifteen real pages. Not forty city landing pages, and not four thin ones.
This lesson and the next one produce one file together: site-architecture.md, the blueprint Module 4 builds from. This lesson settles the page list and the facts only you can supply. The next one settles what every page asks the visitor to do. Then you paste one prompt and let Claude write the whole plan.
Your site is a verification engine
You met this idea in the welcome lesson; here is what it does to your page list. Most people who reach a small firm’s website are not discovering you. Somebody already said your name — a friend, a therapist, another lawyer, a search for your name specifically — and they have arrived to decide whether to believe it. In a survey of small-business legal buyers attributed to Firesign and reported by Attorney at Work, 92% said they trust the lawyer’s biography, more than online reviews at 83%, and 54% searched the lawyer’s own name after getting a referral — more than searched the firm’s, at 44%. (That survey reaches us secondhand, so weigh it as strong direction rather than a measurement you could cite in a brief.)
That changes what the site is for. A bakery’s website has to do discovery, persuasion and conversion from a cold start. Yours mostly has to not lose someone who already half-decided — which is a much easier job, and it explains why the page set below looks the way it does.
Must, should, skip
| Page | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage | Must | Answers who you are, what you do, and where you do it, in seconds. It routes; it rarely converts on its own. |
| Attorney bio — one per lawyer | Must — the highest-value page on the site | Trusted by 92% of the buyers in the Firesign survey, and often the actual landing page because people search the lawyer by name. |
| Practice-area page — one per area you actually want | Must | Where search intent lands, and what AI answer engines read from when someone asks them a legal question. |
| Contact | Must | The conversion endpoint. In several states it is also where a required office address lives. |
| Disclaimer / legal notice | Must — compliance, not marketing | Many states expect a statement that the site is legal information rather than legal advice, and that reading it doesn't create an attorney-client relationship. Module 6 handles the wording. |
| Privacy policy | Must, in practice | Triggered by collecting any personal information at all — a contact form, analytics, a mailing list. Your site will have all three. |
| About / firm story | Should | A true solo can fold it into the bio. Two or more lawyers: build it. |
| Fees or pricing | Should — and it is a bigger lever than it looks | The most-avoided page in the profession and one of the most-searched. More on this in the next lesson. |
| FAQ | Should | The cheapest content you will ever write, because you already answer these questions out loud every week. |
| Testimonials / case results | Should — subject to your state's rules | High persuasive value, high compliance load. Gather them now, publish after Module 6. |
| Accessibility statement | Should | Not federally required for a private firm, and a cheap good-faith signal. Module 6 covers what goes in it. |
| Attorney index (“Our Team”) | Only at two or more attorneys | For a solo it is a redundant click between the homepage and the bio. |
| Blog / resources | Later — never at launch | The most-recommended and least-executed thing in legal marketing. Module 9 gives you a version you'll actually keep up. |
| Location pages | Conditional — see below | Legitimate for real offices. A spam risk otherwise. |
| Careers, Community, Awards, News | Skip | Firm-of-thirty pages. A solo publishing a Careers page looks like a template nobody edited. |
Build them in this order
If you only have the energy for four pages this weekend, these are the four. Everything else can follow next week without costing you a client.
The bio is the page you’ll underinvest in
Ask a lawyer for their bio and you get a résumé. Ask a prospective client what they were looking for on that page and you get something else entirely: can this person handle my problem, and would I mind sitting in a room with them for the next eight months?
- The human paragraph goes before the credentials. One to three paragraphs on who you are, what you do, and why you do this work — specific enough that no other lawyer in your state could have written it. Then bar admissions, education, the rest.
- First person if you’re a solo; third person at two lawyers or more. When the whole proposition is “you are hiring me,” writing about yourself as “Ms. Alvarez” puts a desk between you and the reader. At two or more attorneys, third person keeps the bios consistent.
- The photograph is not optional, and it is the one asset on the whole site that must be a real photograph of the real you. Module 4 explains why that is a hard line rather than a preference.
Then delete half of it
This is the counterintuitive part, and it is the single best-grounded idea about bios we found. Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research, applied to attorney bios by Attorney at Work, found that audiences don’t add credentials — they average them.
What adding one weak credential does — an illustration
Three strong credentials read as a 10. Add a weak fourth and the set reads as an 8. Adding a minor qualification makes you look worse, not better — which matters here because the default behavior of an AI writing a bio from a CV is to include everything. So the plan needs an explicit step: now delete half of it. Keep what a client in your lead practice area would actually care about. Cut the rest, however hard it was to earn.
A practice-area page changes shape with the buyer
This is where generic web advice falls over. A page for someone whose brother was arrested four hours ago and a page for someone comparing will-drafting prices are not the same page with different words in it. The buyer’s emotional state and time horizon are completely different, so the structure has to be too.
| Emergency — criminal, DUI, restraining orders, evictions, a fresh injury | Litigation — family, employment, business disputes, personal injury | Transactional — estate planning, business formation, real estate, IP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How they arrive | Panic. Often at night, often on a phone, sometimes not the client themselves | Anxious, comparison-shopping, deciding over weeks | Deliberate, procrastinating, low urgency, price-aware |
| The top of the page must contain | The phone number, large. When you're available | Reassurance plus a clear first step | The outcome — “your family knows what to do” — not the document |
| Primary action | Call or text. A form is the wrong ask here | Book a consultation | Book a planning session — and show the price |
| The section that does the work | “What happens in the next 24 hours” | “The process, and how long it takes” | “What happens if you don't do this,” then “what you get” |
| Cost section | Free consultation, payment plans | How the fee works — contingency, or the structure | Flat fees, published. The single biggest differentiator available in transactional work |
| Results section | Where your state permits it | Where your state permits it | Usually omit — there is rarely anything meaningful to publish |
| Mobile priority | Extreme. A sticky call bar is not optional | High | Moderate — desktop research is common |
The doorway test
At some point someone will tell you to build a page for every city within fifty miles. Here is the test that settles it, and it is Google’s own position: pages built to rank for near-identical searches, which lead people to something less useful than the real destination, are spam.
The practical version: delete the city name from the page. Does it still read fine? If yes, the page has no reason to exist — it is your existing page with a word swapped. A real location page names the courthouse, the local rules, the judges, the filing timelines, the cases you handled there.
Put your city in the homepage headline and in each practice-area headline, get your Google Business Profile right (Module 9), and stop. That is the whole local-search play at your size, and it works better than thirty thin pages.
Gather the real details now
Claude cannot invent any of this, and it must not try. Have these in front of you before the next lesson’s prompt — it makes the difference between a plan you can build from and a plan full of blanks.
- Your bar number(s) and every state you're admitted in
- Your office address, and a phone number you will actually answer
- How you charge, in the words you'd use on the phone — flat fee, hourly rate, contingency percentage, retainer
- Consent-cleared testimonials or reviews — meaning the client said yes, in writing, to it appearing
- Whether your state permits publishing case results — “not sure” is fine, Module 6 shows you how to check
- Real photographs: your headshot, your actual office, your actual street
- The counties and courts you genuinely appear in
- A response-time promise you can keep on your worst week — not your best one
Anything you don’t have yet goes into the plan in square brackets — [FILL IN: bar number] — so it’s visible and unmissable. Never let the AI supply a fact about you. A plausible-looking invented number of years in practice is the kind of thing that sits on a website for two years before anyone notices.
Client testimonials and case results are regulated advertising in most states, with real variation in what has to accompany them. Collect them into your notes now — with written permission — but don’t decide how to word them yet. Module 6’s compliance check covers exactly how these get phrased and what has to sit next to them.
Your page list feels too short. It probably isn’t. Every page you add is a page you have to keep true, and a thin page costs you more credibility than a missing page does. Ten good pages beat forty thin ones, and you can add the eleventh next month in about four minutes — Module 9 shows you how.
You have a written page list you could read to someone: which pages exist, which practice area leads, and which pages are deliberately not being built yet. The real-details checklist is gathered, or the gaps are written down as brackets. Nothing here is built — that’s correct. One more decision to make first.
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