1&1 MyWebsite: A Good Choice for Law Firms?

Gyi Tsakalakis
October 10, 2011

1&1 has recently been advertising pretty heavily for its MyWebsite product. Have you seen this commercial:

They claim that setting up a business website is easy whether you're a lawyer, a photographer, or a beauty salon. But is the 1&1 MyWebsite product a good choice?

Price

Like most turn-key web-based website solutions, the 1&1 MyWebsite offering is very competitive on price. From their website, it looks like their basic site offering will run you about $10 per month. That's a really good price.

Ease-of-Use

1&1 touts a 4 step process for launching a new site: Select your business category, enter your business data, launch, and customize.

Again, like most turn-key web-based website solutions, the setup is pretty self-explanatory. You can point and click your way to a new website.

Function

From what I can tell by my initial review, the functionality of the product is pretty basic. I don't see a blog component, which I would suggest is a critical lacking piece.

Thoughts

The basic offering's price tag of $10 per month is probably pretty attractive to a lot of small firms and lawyers who are looking for an online business card. However, I believe you can accomplish just about everything this website product offers and a whole lot more by using an installed version of WordPress from WordPress.org.

The truth is, with regard to costs, you're really paying for 3 major components when you're talking website design: Domain Registration (approx. $10/yr), Hosting (anywhere from $5 to $100 per month depending on your hosting needs), and Design (theme design and development, premium templates, custom design, etc).

Technically speaking, there really isn't a major difference between the major open-source content management systems. I prefer WordPress for ease of use, community support, and wide theme selection.

Design considerations are a bit more tricky. Getting a custom designed theme can range in price from a couple hundred dollars to thousands of dollars depending on the process, the designer, and the requested functionality of the site.

In my opinion, one of the most compelling reasons not to go with a turn-key do-it-yourself website product is the design aspect. If you go to 1and1's MyWebsite portfolio, you will start to appreciate what I'm talking about. With all respect to the attorney websites on display there, it's clear that they were done by folks who are lawyers, not web designers.

The problem with this can be that even if you get people to your site (which is a completely different discussion and an area that I think a product like this is likely to fail miserably), the question will become, "will people be motivated to contact you through your site?" Unfortunately, based on some of the examples that I saw on display, the answer is probably not.

So, if you're tempted to sign-up for the 1and1 MyWebsite product, in the very least, consider investing in having a design professional work on your customizing the look and feel of your site.

Still, I think you're better off registering a domain, installing WordPress, and investing in a custom theme that includes real, as opposed to stock images. And of course, your most significant investments should be made into getting your website in front of your target audiences. That means, content, social sharing, high-end link development, citation building, and search advertising.

Gyi Tsakalakis
Co-Founder of AttorneySync
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Steph
12 years ago

Hello. This is a nice review. The 1&1 My Website is very easy to work with. The My Website Plus even allows you to add a shopping cart. This is very user friendly and for beginners or those who have no programming knowledge. I tried to like for Facebook, but it appears that plugin is not working properly. You may need to update your plug in if you're using word press for this site here. Have a great day!

Let's Discuss Your Growth

Helping law firms grow profitably with digital marketing and can prove it.

Barry Conybeare

We are so impressed with AttorneySync and their digital marketing services. We started with an audit of our digital presence and hired them thereafter. Fixes to the website and other platforms quickly followed and we have seen a substantial increase in online traffic, new client calls, and new client contracts. Strongly recommend AttorneySync!

Let's Talk

How can we help?

More From Our Blog

June 8, 2023
On Local Law Firm SEO Rank Tracking and Reporting

Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]

Read More
June 7, 2023
On Attribution

John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]

Read More
March 22, 2023
I asked ChatGPT to Recommend a Personal Injury Law Firm

I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]

Read More
February 17, 2023
My Take on Google Search's Guidance on AI-Generated Content & Law Firm SEO

If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]

Read More
February 16, 2023
Google Adds New SEO Best Practices for Links

If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]

Read More
February 1, 2023
Authenticity & Engagement

The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]

Read More
January 19, 2023
ChatGPT for Legal Marketing

The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]

Read More
May 26, 2022
SEO Expectations for Law Firms

How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]

Read More
May 6, 2022
Who Should Do Marketing?

And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]

Read More

Let's Discuss

Questions or comments? Let's discuss on social!
envelope
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram