Online presence is critical for most of businesses, including law firms.

In essence, a website, for a service based business such as a law firm, serves the following goals:

• It creates a flow of inbound clients through SEO or paid advertisement
• It explains your services and how you can help them
• It builds trust through professional design, right content structure, and testimonials.

Difference between doing it yourself and hiring a designer

There are lot of cases where it’s wiser to create your website by yourself.

• You don’t have the budget to hire a freelancer or an agency
• The website cannot generate you clients and revenue
• You’ve just started your business and the website is not a primary objective
• Your target audience does not care about your website
• You want to learn and you enjoy doing it yourself

There are dozens of platforms that allow you create a website by yourself with little to no knowledge and at different levels of customization and sophistication. However, there are several things to keep in mind.

First, doing yourself is kind of free, except you spend your time. If your time is valued at $50/hour and you spent 20 hours learning and building, then you spent $1000.

Second, going with basic text and images means you might not hit your goal of getting visitors to take action. It's like using a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn't really show people why they should choose you.

Last but not least, there are hundreds of nuances when building a website. You won’t know about them and you’ll most likely not spend time taking courses and reading books about user experience, lead generation, SEO, design, copy, and so on.

As a result, you’ll spend time building a website that is generic and not optimized. As I mentioned earlier, there are certain use cases that this outcome would be sufficient. However, if your customers rely on the website to make a decision to whether to hire your or not, then it makes sense to invest money into building a website that actually works for your goals.

Should I hire a freelancer or an agency?

It depends on a few factors.

First, hiring a freelancer would cost much less than hiring an agency. In my experience, agencies charge 2-4 times more.