A modern web presence for a legal practice with two offices

The brief

ES & Associates came to me through a referral from a previous client. They're a law firm with offices in Gauteng and Mpumalanga, and the site they had at the time was outdated and broken in places that mattered , contact forms not delivering, mobile layout unusable, and a visual identity that read older than the firm actually was.

They had a clear list of goals when we first sat down:

1. Replace the broken site urgently, clients were Googling them and landing on something that actively undermined the firm.
2. Look credible to existing referrals. When a new client meets one of the partners and Googles them afterward, the site needs to confirm what they just experienced.
3. Generate inbound leads from search. Most of their traffic came from referrals, but they wanted the site to start working for them too.
4. Feel like a brand that relates to younger clientele. This was the most interesting part of the brief, and the one that shaped the most design decisions.

That last goal cuts against the default for legal sites. Most law firm websites lean conservative on purpose: dark colours, classical typography, serious portraits in front of bookshelves. ES & Associates wanted to keep the credibility weight of a legal practice while signalling that they understand a generation of clients who don't respond to that aesthetic.

The approach

I built the site on WordPress with a custom child theme, using Elementor for the flexible page sections. WordPress was the right call here for two reasons that matter for legal clients specifically: the firm needed to be able to publish updates and articles themselves, and they needed something the next developer (whoever that ends up being) can pick up without learning a custom stack.

The visual direction came from heavily modifying a starting theme rather than building from scratch. The firm already had a logo and brand identity, so the work was extending that, picking the typography, refining the colour palette, and designing the components, rather than starting from zero. This is the right move for a 2–3 month timeline; building a custom design system from the ground up would have eaten the budget without materially changing the outcome.

The build

Three pieces of the build are worth talking about in detail.

The header

The header was the first thing I designed and the last thing I stopped tweaking. It carries a lot of weight: it's the first thing every visitor sees, and it has to communicate professionalism, give the visitor an immediate way to act, and stay visible without dominating.

What I landed on is a clean white header with the firm's contact details and office hours sitting alongside a single, clear Contact us now button. No mega-menu, no dropdown maze, just the things a prospective client actually needs in their first three seconds: how to reach the firm, when, and a clear next action.

The two-office maps

This is the detail I'm proudest of, partly because it's a practical problem most attorney sites don't bother solving.

ES & Associates operates from offices in Gauteng and Mpumalanga. A client trying to find them shouldn't have to scroll through one office's details before finding the other. So I built the contact section as side-by-side embedded Google Maps, each with a background image of its location, the office address, contact details, and direct links to directions.

The theme I started with had a built-in Google Maps component, but the way it handled multiple maps on a single page wasn't straightforward, it assumed one location. I had to work around its assumptions to get two independent map instances rendering correctly side-by-side and behaving well on mobile. Worth the effort: it's one of the first things visitors comment on.

Structuring practice areas, services, and the team

The firm has multiple practice areas (commercial, family, conveyancing, labour, etc.) and a team of attorneys to introduce. How you structure these sections is the difference between a site that feels organised and a site that feels like a content dump.

A few decisions:

• Practice areas got their own structured pattern, each one introduced with the same shape (heading, short description, key matters covered, who to contact). Repetition here is a feature, not a bug; it makes the firm feel methodical.
• The team page uses identically-cropped bio photos. The firm sent through portraits taken at different times by different photographers, with different lighting and crops. Standardising the crop and treatment was a small detail that made the team page read as one team rather than a collage of individuals.
• The clients section took the most unglamorous work. Their existing client logos were inconsistent in colour, format, and quality. I normalised them visually so the section reads as a unified vote of confidence rather than a mismatched logo wall.

What the firm wrote vs. what I built

The partners wrote all the substantive copy themselves, practice area descriptions, biographies, service explanations. My job was to find the right place for each piece and make sure the structure served their content rather than the other way around. For legal clients specifically, this is almost always the right division of labour: they know their practice; I know the web.

The outcome

The site went live in late 2023. Two things have stuck:

• They use it. The firm's partners and staff send the site link in client communications, on email signatures, and in pitches. A site is only as useful as the team trusting it enough to point people at it.
• I still maintain it. ES & Associates is on a content-update retainer with me, I handle the edits, the security updates, the small additions as the firm grows. This is the part of the work that doesn't show up in the screenshot but matters most: the relationship continues past launch, and the site keeps reflecting the firm as it changes.

What I'd do differently

If I were building this today, I'd push harder on a few things.

The Google Maps integration would move to a custom block rather than fighting the theme's built-in component, fewer workarounds, cleaner code, easier handover. I'd also build out a structured Practice Areas custom post type from day one, instead of using individual pages. It's easier to maintain and lets the firm grow without restructuring later.

But these are refinements, not regrets. The site does what it was hired to do, the firm uses it daily, and the work continues, which is the only review that matters.