Law firm website design for an immigration, personal injury and workers' compensation practice in Glendale, California. We audited a six-page website builder site, wrote the strategy, drew the wireframes and the visual design, and built a custom WordPress theme: 85 pages in English, every one of them also in Armenian, with an intake and booking system behind them.
Ani A. Petrosyan runs Petrosyan Law Group, APC from an office on Glenoaks Boulevard in Glendale. She is admitted before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and two federal district courts, and the office works in English, Armenian, Russian and Spanish. The firm had practised immigration law and was expanding into personal injury and workers' compensation.
Its website was six pages on GoDaddy's website builder. There was no phone number on any page. The only way in was a two-field form that asked for a name and an email address. The homepage headline was "Passion. Expertise. Dedication." and the word "Armenian" appeared once, in a city where roughly a third of residents are Armenian. A page taking payments for a Diversity Visa lottery deadline that had passed in November 2024 was still live. And four separate law firms in the area traded under the Petrosyan or Petrosian name, two of them in personal injury.
So the job started with a diagnosis and ended with a new site. A 92-page SEO audit, a website strategy, black-and-white wireframes, a visual design, then the theme, the content and the Armenian edition. One idea held the whole build together: this firm doesn't have one website. It has three, sharing a domain.
The audit inspected every page, header, image and directory listing, then mapped the market across all three practice areas. Some of what it found was urgent. Some of it was good news: the old site loaded in 158 milliseconds, faster than the name-rival's WordPress build, so speed became a constraint on the new design rather than something to win back later. The strategy that followed turned the findings into four routes in and a page architecture.
The biggest risk in this build was designing for the average of three clients. That person doesn't exist.
An immigration client is anxious and often abroad. Someone hurt in a car accident last week needs to know it costs nothing to start. An injured worker is mid-claim and worried about the job. The theme gives every page a practice line, and the line sets the call to action, the fee language and who answers.
The buttons above are the order of the mobile call bar on each line's pages. The fee chips are the firm's published fee models. Wherever the site says there is no fee up front, it also says the client may remain responsible for case costs and expenses. That caveat lives in the theme code rather than an editable field, so it can't be deleted by accident.
Eight practice areas shared one page on the old site, so the firm couldn't rank for anything it had no page about. The wireframes set out a nested architecture in black and white: every matter page sits inside its practice hub, every child links to its parent and the parent links to every child. Eleven desktop screens and six mobile screens covered every template, with numbered build notes beside each screen and none of them on the page.
The wireframes proved the structure. The visual design decided how it feels: a cool, near-black base that lets photography carry the weight, and one warm accent used with discipline. Apricot appears as a short rule above an eyebrow, a fee chip outline, the primary button and the bar number, and almost nowhere else. That restraint is why it still registers on the fifth screen.
Apricot is Armenia's emblematic fruit and the third band of its flag, which is officially apricot rather than orange. It is a quiet nod to the audience that matters most in Glendale, and reads to everyone else as a warm, confident accent.
Every photograph on the site is cool, desaturated and low-key. A cool accent would disappear into it. A warm one separates cleanly at any size.
Search for Glendale attorneys and you get navy and gold, or burgundy and serif capitals. Navy and gold, burgundy, cream and the sage-to-teal palettes were all ruled out, not for being ugly but for being indistinguishable.
Instrument Serif says it, Archivo explains it and IBM Plex Mono labels it. The serif has the Didone bones of the classical serif inside the firm's seal, so the headline voice shares its DNA without imitating it. It has one weight, so hierarchy comes from size and space rather than bolding. All three families are open-licence and self-hosted, so nothing is fetched from a third party while a page renders.
A growing share of legal questions is answered by an AI summary before anyone reaches a website. Assistants lift passages, not pages, so every practice, matter and city page follows one pattern. We wrote the copy in US English, as the firm's clients read it, and every page cites the primary source it relies on: USCIS, the Department of State, 8 CFR, the California Labor Code, the DWC and the WCAB.
City pages are where law firm SEO usually turns into a doorway network: the same page with a different place name. We drew a line in the design deck. The homepage claims the region, a city page owns one city and one practice, and the matter pages explain the law once. There is no Burbank marriage green card page, and there never will be.
Speaking four languages and publishing in four languages are different things. The site never implies a translation that isn't there.
The strategy planned four Armenian pages. The finished site has an Armenian twin for all 85 English pages and all five guides. The Armenian is never machine-translated: an automatic translator handles Russian and Spanish only, and it isn't loaded on Armenian pages at all.
The old form told the office a name and an email address. The new one asks for a phone number every time, the matter type, whether there's a deadline, the preferred language and how the client wants to speak, plus a few lines about what happened. Opened from the marriage green card page, it arrives with marriage green card already selected. Maria and Veronica can triage without calling back first.
A law firm website in California is advertising under the Rules of Professional Conduct. Bolting compliance on at review is how pages get ugly, so we built the space for it into the layouts and wrote the rules into the theme. The content review stays with the attorney.
The firm had no photography and declined a shoot. Legal sites usually fill that gap with stock gavels, handshakes and courthouse steps. We wrote an art direction instead: wide anamorphic framing, low-key exposure, deep shadow and one warm light source per frame. People appear anonymously or not at all, because this is a firm that handles frightening situations and the pictures should be calm about it.
The old site had no structured data, no meta descriptions and no canonical tags. The new theme handles the technical side automatically and steps aside where Yoast takes over, keeping its own schema graph. A launch plugin builds every page, guide and image, and writes the Yoast data for each one, so the whole site can be rebuilt from files.
These are counts of what was built, taken from the theme, its content files and the page tree. The site has not launched yet, so we aren't publishing traffic, ranking, enquiry or review figures. We'll add them once there's enough data to report honestly.
