Paperstreet Review: Marketing & Website Design for Law Firms

ADA Compliance

All of PaperStreet’s websites start with Level AA Compliance in WCAG 2.1, and the team takes pride in incorporating ADA compliance into their projects.

Front-and-center Web Design Portfolio

PaperStreet makes its substantial web design portfolio a huge part of its site. The portfolio is sortable by firm size, service level, and logo design clients, among other things, and is a window into its designers’ aesthetic, which typically features sophisticated, elegant, and creative homepages with colorful, beautiful, full-size background images. Many of the portfolio sites are fun, engaging, and relatable without being too whimsical. You’ll see eye-catching, professional websites with succinct, powerful language and creative use of white space. You could play in this portfolio for hours to decide whether Paper Street is for you, though you’ll probably get a feel for it pretty quickly.

Education

PaperStreet maintains a free, content-rich, education-focused blog called Raising the Bar that is built to teach you about internet marketing from the web design, internet marketing, content, and branding perspectives. It is walking the walk with this stuff, and you’ll benefit from reviewing it. Sure, you can get this information elsewhere, but its perspective is useful and its staff has curated a ton of useful information in one easy-to-digest resource.

Experience and subject-matter expertise

PaperStreet isn’t the first website designer and SEO services provider that was started by lawyers and that focuses on lawyers. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. It knows best practices for a whole host of lawyer-specific issues. This includes options for attorney bios, practice area listings, attorney listings, and blog integration. The company has built websites for lawyers in nearly every practice area, and it uses real, live lawyers to write your content. Importantly, you can trust that it is familiar with your ethical obligations in the digital marketing and advertising space.

The seven guarantees

PaperStreet’s high-end offering makes seven guarantees:

1. you will love your design;
2. same-day support;
3. free education;
4. no hidden charges;
5. you own your site (no strings attached);
6. create results; and
7. make life easier (one agency for web, branding, and marketing).

We like the approach and the guarantees because it demonstrates that PaperStreet stands behind its work. That’s not nothing these days.

PaperStreet Pricing

PaperStreet has made some effort to make pricing at least a bit more transparent. It offers four levels of service, called the Essentials, Plus, Custom, and Enterprise levels. As with most website designers and SEO services providers, PaperStreet doesn’t make pricing for its top service packages (Plus, Custom, and Enterprise) available on the website. But it does a solid job explaining the differentiators between the levels. Instead it encourages you to contact a sales representative for more accurate pricing related to your specific custom job. It will, as ever, depend on the size and scope of your project.

Still, PaperStreet offers a lower-end service (“Essentials”) that is an off-the-rack website solution. This level doesn’t offer custom anything, but there are countless options to choose from and the templates are powerful and beautifully-designed in their own right. Pricing of the Essentials package depends on who will write your website’s content. If you do, you’ll pay a one-time setup fee of $2,000 and $100/month thereafter. However, if you have PaperStreet’s team write your content, the Essentials package comes with a $3,500 one-time setup fee (and the same $100/month thereafter).

Alternatively, if you’re looking for a custom website, which is what makes up the majority of PaperStreet’s portfolio, you can expect to spend $5000 on the low end to over $75,000 if you want all the bells and whistles. Regardless of the package you choose, however, you’ll get logo design services included. And you can always add services à la carte. It claims to have a “plan for every type of client,” including flat rate, per project pricing on Enterprise-level contracts that allow for unlimited design time.

Things You Might Want To Know

A focus on education

PaperStreet believes that every firm should have a website that educates its current and potential clients with insightful, relevant, helpful articles. This is at the core of the inbound marketing philosophy. And it’s rooted in a genuine goal of providing value first. PaperStreet boasts user-friendly site structures, a reliable hosting platform, copy written by attorney writers, and mobile-friendly, responsive websites. PaperStreet offers all of this in order to give your potential client what they need from the moment they arrive on your site. We like that. PaperStreet also works hard to help you express your competitive advantage quickly, cleverly, and in a useful way.

A full-service shop

PaperStreet is a full-service digital marketing shop. It does website design, of course. But it offers a host of ancillary services, too. Notably, PaperStreet offers website management with same-day (often same-hour) service for updates, and claim to be available for you 24/7/365. PaperStreet has also designed and built its own proprietary content management system—”Total Control,” which it touts as being built with law firms and lawyers top of mind—and will help you make website updates on your own with little technical knowledge. PaperStreet also does websites in WordPress, so don’t be afraid of Total Control. If it works for you, great. If it doesn’t, just use WordPress instead. (They’ve been building custom WordPress websites since WordPress’s earliest days and pride themselves on customizing their WordPress installs to work well for law firms).

The onboarding process

If you choose PaperStreet, it will work with you to review your current digital assets. From there, you’ll get help planning your campaign, generating ideas, composing unique designs (if you pay to do such things), creating content (ditto), building and launching the site, and analyzing your results.