When considering the life of a law practice web site, the design & development is only a small portion of the overall cost. Just like with people, creating a child takes a lot less time than parenting them throughout their life.

There are tools out there that will help you (or a developer) create a beautiful law practice web site quick and cheap. Unfortunately, sometimes that translates into a huge cost just to add an extra page.

For example, Lori is a family practice attorney. Her law practice web site is great, with lots of graphics. Her cheap web developer created the original site quickly by using a tool that basically painted the site. Lori is a happy lawyer.  But last week the news started talking about a new ruling and she's getting flooded with calls about it (non-billable calls).  Lori wants to add a new page onto her site so she doesn't have to repeat the same answer over and over again.  She calls her web site guy, but he says it'll cost almost the same price to add the page, and it'll be a few weeks before he can get to it.  Lori wants to update her site today.  Instead, Lori's still answering those unbillable calls.

Mark has a different story with his Colorado corporate law practice.  His site was humming along until that bad thunderstorm that happened down in Texas.  How does that affect him?  The storm hit the company hosting his site and in the process, his web site went down.  He wants to move his site up to Denver, but doesn't have a copy of it.  No backups were done.  Mark is having a new web site developed, and regular backups are priority number one.

And then there's security.  Keeping your email address safe from spambots that harvest email addresses, keeping up with the latest security patches, making sure the site is setup safely to begin with, etc. 

Keeping the site updated.  A high maintenance cost discourages changes, which make web sites go stale and links go bad. It also means changes you will pay for requires too much time.  If the news is getting everyone buzzing about the latest story, you want to address is quickly and effectively in the web site of your law practice.

Legal Firm Web Host has an infrastructure designed into your law practice web site that enables you to easily make changes. Some may say you do not need that power, but if you want your site responding to your needs, we say you do.

Legal Firm Web Host takes maintenance very seriously: off-site backups, monitoring the latest security patches, monitoring new software releases that might effect your site, etc. 

Therefore, when selecting the solution to your law practice web site, the time and cost of maintenance must be considered up front. Otherwise a wonderful web site could stall out after a few months, sending clients to your competition or keeping you answering those unbillable questions (groan).