Law firm website design services: what actually arrives

A website design service is a list of artefacts, not a promise: what arrives, in what order, and how a firm can tell it arrived rather than was described. The £890 Price Transparency Pack finishes in ten working days and the Firm Site is £2,400, both fixed.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What actually arrives when a firm buys a website design service?

Nine things change hands. Everything else on a proposal is a description of somebody working.

The distinction matters because proposals in this market are mostly written in verbs. "Discovery", "strategy", "wireframing", "optimisation" and "launch support" describe activity, and activity cannot be handed over, checked or taken to a different supplier. An artefact can.

The damaging admission, early: none of the nine produces an enquiry. They remove reasons a firm cannot be found and give a stranger the answers they came for, and month one produces nothing measurable while all of it is being made.

Which deliverable has to exist before the next one can start?

Four of them are gates. The rest can be worked on in parallel and usually are.

The page schedule gates everything. Until the list of URLs is fixed, nobody can say who is drafting what, and a schedule agreed in week three is a project that has already slipped.

The drafting plan gates the copy, and the copy gates the build. This is where most website projects actually run over — not in design, but in text that was assumed and never assigned. A plan naming a person and a date for each page is the cheapest insurance available, and it costs one meeting.

The practice-area template gates the other pages. Laying out one page properly and agreeing it beats laying out twenty and amending them all.

Everything gates the accounts handover, which comes last and should be a condition of final payment rather than a favour afterwards.

The price and service pages sit outside the chain, which is the useful property of the £890 pack: they can be produced against an existing site without waiting for a rebuild, and the SRA Transparency Rules have asked for that information since 6 December 2018, checked 3 August 2026. Whether the firm meets its obligations is a judgement for the firm and its COLP.

How do you tell a deliverable arrived rather than was described?

Each of the nine has a test a non-technical partner can apply in a few minutes.

The last row is the one that gets skipped and the one a firm needs two years later. A supplier who cannot produce a dated record of what was published has left the firm's own history with a third party.

Two of the nine are worth insisting on in writing even if the rest are taken on trust: the accounts, and the draft copy before build. The first decides whether the firm owns anything; the second is the only point at which changing a page still costs nothing.

What is inside the £890 pack, and what sits outside it?

The price and service pages on the site the firm already has, finished in ten working days, and nothing else.

Inside: the drafting plan for those pages, the drafts themselves, the built pages, and the published record. Outside: the rest of the site, the practice-area pages, the technical handover on pages the pack did not touch, and any judgement about whether the result satisfies the firm. That last exclusion is not a hedge — only the firm and its COLP can make that call, and a supplier saying otherwise is offering something it cannot give.

It exists because it is the one deliverable that finishes on its own. A firm whose site otherwise works does not need a rebuild to close the published-information gap, and 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions — measured 3 August 2026 — so the pages the rules push a firm towards are also the ones answering the most-asked question in the market.

What does a Firm Site add that the pack does not?

The other eight artefacts, applied to the whole site rather than to one set of pages.

Take £700 off a build taken with six months of retainer. Nothing is priced per enquiry, lead or matter — LASPO 2012 section 56 makes referral fees in prescribed legal business a problem for the paying firm as much as for the party paid.

For scale: £890 is roughly what 62 Cardiff residential conveyancing clicks cost at Google's own price of £14.33, measured 3 August 2026. That is 62 × £14.33 = £888.46, arithmetic on a click price rather than a forecast of anything.

Writing is inside every figure above. It is the item most often handed back to the firm on a proposal, and handing it back is what turns a three-week build into a three-month one.

Which of these suppliers say what you get before you call?

None of the four named here published a price when we read them, which is worth stating plainly since we are asking a firm to compare on that basis.

Across all 40 suppliers read in full that day:

⚠ The benchmark records presence, not amount, and it says nothing about what any of these four delivers. No figure is attributed to a named business anywhere in this programme, because the tooling that read those pages picked up case values and fragments alongside genuine fees.

A published price is not a measure of quality. It is a measure of how much of the scope conversation happens before the meeting rather than inside it, which is a different and smaller claim.

Where is another supplier the better choice?

Three cases, and the first is the common one.

themodernfirm.com is the sort of supplier to approach when the firm wants a look of its own and is willing to sit through a design process to get it. A fixed list of nine artefacts is the opposite trade: less exploration, a known end.

novicell.com and lawue.com both work at a scale above ours. A firm with several offices, a document library and an existing content team is buying an integration project rather than a website, and neither the pack nor the Firm Site is scoped for that.

thelegalmarketingcompany.com runs a wider remit. A firm wanting brand, events, print and search held by one supplier should talk to a full-service agency and not to us.

We cannot promise a ranking and neither can anybody else, and we do not manage ad spend. If the firm needs instructions this quarter, none of the nine deliverables will produce them in time.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026 — including several on this page. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.

The free report gives you the full count, named, so you can repeat it rather than take ours. It also shows how many people search for your practice areas in your town, and what those clicks cost to buy at Google's own prices.

Get the report — five questions, about two minutes →

No call required. Our own prices are on that page.

Where should I read next?

On what the price and service pages are expected to contain: what the SRA transparency rules actually require on a website.

On who inside the firm should hold this and how seniority works around it: what are the ranks in a law firm? and how to get ranked in Legal 500?

On the channel choice before the build choice: what is the best way to advertise a law firm?

At two or three fee earners: what are the marketing ideas for small law firms?

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