A lot of lawyers must be frustrated artists…

Because every lawyer seems to have excruciatingly specific thoughts on exactly how their website needs to look.

Show a lawyer a website mockup, and the feedback will always start with “OK, this is almost there.”

After that, the deluge…

• “OK, so let’s move the logo ten pixels to the right”
• “Make the video flush with the blah-de-blah”
• “And let’s fiddle with the color palette”

Look, I get it.

You want your website to reflect your brand. And you don’t want your website to have tacky graphics and Comic Sans headlines. So your inner OCD comes out and you start rearranging pixels…

Unfortunately, that age of “pixel perfect” design has been over for almost ten years.

Previously, before the iPhone came out in 2007, you could make your website “pixel perfect.” I know, because I designed a lot of websites back then. 99% of “web design” was actually making sure that your design looked the same in different browsers.

But as iPhones and Androids became over half of web traffic, making a website “pixel perfect” no longer makes sense.

That’s because websites have historically been designed to look good when given 1,000 pixels of width.

Meanwhile, an iPhone only gives a browser 320 pixels to show a website.

If you insist on making your website look perfect at 1,000 pixels, it will look like crap at 320 pixels. The reverse is also true.

Instead of gunning for a “pixel perfect” look at EITHER 320 OR 1,000 pixels, you need to make look good BOTH on an iPhone that’s 320 pixels wide AND a desktop that’s 1,000 pixels wide”

Happily, if you embrace this new “responsive” approach, you’ll make A LOT MORE money.

That’s because more than half of searchers click on a Google ad and land on your website while on their mobile device. If your website looks great on an iPhone, you’ll be making things easy for more than half your visitors. This will get you a lot more leads!

By contrast, if your website looks like crap on an iPhone, your visitors will have to zoom and finger-drag their way through your page. Naturally, if you make it hard for over half your visitors to read your page, you’ll get many fewer leads.

There are two workarounds to this problem.

First, if your website is NOT “mobile responsive”, you can target your ads ONLY to reach desktops (and NOT using smartphones). Unfortunately, this will leave you with an ever-decreasing amount of traffic. You’ll also be leaving a lot of free money on the table for your competitors to pick up.

Second, you can make your website “mobile responsive”, and make a lot more money.

If you want to see if your current website is “mobile responsive”, click over here and paste in your URL:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

If you’re currently advertising on Google AdWords and you’re not using a “mobile responsive” page, you need to fix that right away.

-Bob Hiler