A website that better represents the business.
Prospective leads see you website before they speak to you, it needs to look professional
What did the firm need?
A boutique shipping law firm specialising in niche areas of maritime law. The existing website no longer reflected the firm’s positioning or reputation.
This is a firm that works at the serious end of shipping and maritime law. Their clients are not searching for a law firm on Google – they are referred, they already know the name, and when they land on the website they are checking that the firm is what they expect it to be.
The old site was not passing that test. The design had dated, the structure did not communicate the depth of the practice areas clearly, and it was not easy for the firm to keep current without developer involvement.
For a regulated legal practice, the website also needs to carry compliance and regulatory content properly – not as an afterthought. The brief was to rebuild it: clean, authoritative, easy to manage, and appropriate for the firm’s standing in a specialist legal market.
What the site needed to do:
- Reflect the firm’s actual reputation and positioning – not lag behind it
- Communicate practice area expertise clearly and confidently without unnecessary complexity
- Present the team and their experience in a way that builds immediate credibility
- Carry regulatory and compliance content properly as a regulated legal practice
- Give the firm a platform they could manage and update without technical support
- Feel authoritative and current without being overdesigned or distracting
Our approach
Project overview
A bespoke brochure site redesign for a boutique maritime law firm. Simplicity and confidence throughout – the structure is deliberately straightforward so the firm’s expertise and content take centre stage rather than the design.
Design
- Existing brand retained – established blue corporate palette carried through the new design
- Strong typography and restrained layouts informed by high-quality legal and maritime sector references
- Moving maritime or London cityscape imagery on the homepage provides a strong first impression without feeling inappropriate for a legal audience
- Content-first structure so visitors can scan and navigate quickly without feeling overwhelmed
Site structure
- Clearly defined sections for Practice Areas, Our People, Newsletter, Contact and regulatory Terms and Conditions
- Compliance and regulatory content structured properly as a required element, not a footnote
- Navigation kept deliberately simple – visitors find what they need without complexity or distraction
- Platform built to evolve as the firm grows without ongoing development dependency
WordPress build
Bespoke build on our own custom starter theme. Purpose-built ACF content blocks give the firm full control over practice area content, team profiles and newsletter entries without needing technical support. Default Gutenberg blocks disabled entirely – the site stays consistent and professionally presented however many updates are made over time.
Compliance
Regulated legal practices have specific requirements for how certain information is presented online. Compliance and regulatory content was built into the structure from the outset – not retrofitted. The result is a site that meets professional requirements while remaining uncluttered and easy to navigate for visitors who are not looking for that content.
A similar brief?
If your firm’s website has fallen behind the quality of the practice itself – and you need something that holds up in front of serious clients – we should talk.
Tell us what you need and we will tell you how we would approach it.
The results
97/100
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop at launch
Zero
Third-party page builders or plugin frameworks – built entirely on our own custom theme
100%
Of content manageable by the firm internally – practice areas, team profiles and newsletters updated without developer support
Built in
Regulatory and compliance content structured properly from the start – not retrofitted after the fact
Redesigned
Existing brand retained but fully redesigned – the site now reflects the firm’s actual reputation rather than lagging behind it
Simple
Deliberately straightforward structure – the complexity is in the legal work, not in navigating the website
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. Before any design work goes in, we run the blank theme through Google PageSpeed Insights and aim for 100 out of 100 on both mobile and desktop. That discipline is what makes the performance scores possible.
Plugins
We keep third-party plugins to a minimum. This site uses ACF-powered content blocks edited in the Gutenberg editor. The default WordPress block library was disabled entirely – editors can only use the purpose-built blocks we created, which means every page is built consistently and on-brand regardless of who published it.
Compliance structure
Regulatory and terms content built into the site architecture from the start. For a regulated legal practice, having compliance information in the right place and in a maintainable format is not optional. The firm can update regulatory content directly without developer involvement and without risk of disrupting the rest of the site.
Content management
Practice areas, team profiles and newsletter entries all manageable directly by the firm. The editing experience is intentionally straightforward – this is a small team who need to keep the site current without relying on anyone else to do it for them.
Why WordPress was the right platform for this firm.
Law firms have a specific problem with their websites: the people who visit them already know who they are.
Boutique specialist firms do not win clients through search traffic or paid ads. They win them through reputation and referral. The website exists to confirm what a prospective client already suspects – that this is a serious, capable firm that knows its area of law inside out.
That is a different brief to a lead generation site. It does not need funnels or conversion optimisation. It needs to be impeccably presented, easy to navigate, properly compliant and – critically – to feel right to someone who spends their professional life in a world where precision and credibility are non-negotiable.
WordPress gave us the control to build something that met all of those requirements without unnecessary complexity. The compliance structure is built into the architecture, not hacked in afterwards. The editing experience is simple enough that a small legal team can keep the site current without calling us. And the performance is as good as any site we build – because we start from the same blank, performance-first theme regardless of whether it is a large ecommerce site or a four-page brochure for a boutique maritime law firm.
The brief was simplicity and confidence. WordPress delivered both.
