Hartwell & Rowe
A twelve-year-old law firm site, rebuilt around the four cases they actually want
Inquiry form completions up 64% in the first quarter, and the partners now publish their own articles.
- Webflow design
- Webflow development
- CMS setup
- SEO migration
A wireframe of the page structure we built for Hartwell & Rowe. We draw these rather than publish screenshots, so the case study stays accurate as the client keeps editing their site.
+64%
Inquiry form completions
Q1 after launch versus the same quarter the year before
212
URLs redirected
Every old URL mapped by hand, no wildcard catch-all
1.4s
Largest Contentful Paint
Down from 5.8s on the previous site
19 → 4
Practice areas promoted
The remaining fifteen kept as a capabilities list
Figures come from the firm's Google Analytics 4 property and Search Console, compared against the twelve months before launch.
What was going wrong
Hartwell & Rowe had grown from three partners to eleven, but the website still described the firm as it was in 2012. Practice areas had been added as ad-hoc pages over the years, so the site listed nineteen services with no hierarchy and no way for a visitor to tell which ones the firm actually wanted.
Every article had to go through an outside developer, which meant a two-week lag and an invoice. The firm had stopped publishing entirely eighteen months before we met them.
The single contact form sat on one page, three clicks deep, and asked for eleven fields including a fax number.
What we did about it
In the order it happened, including the decisions the client pushed back on.
Cut nineteen practice areas down to four, then build for those
We sat with the managing partner and ranked every practice area by billable value and by how much the firm wanted more of it. Four came out clearly ahead. Those four got full pages with their own inquiry paths; the rest became a single, honest capabilities list. The site stopped pretending everything was equally important.
Put the inquiry form where people already are
Rather than one contact page, each practice area page ends with a short form that names the practice area in its own heading. Five fields instead of eleven. Submissions route to the partner who owns that practice area, tagged with the page they came from, so nobody has to work out who should reply.
Move insights into the CMS and hand it over
Articles, attorney profiles and practice areas all became Webflow collections with plain-language field labels. Attorney profiles reference their practice areas, so a new hire appears on the right pages automatically. We recorded a nine-minute walkthrough; the first partner-written article went up four days after launch.
Protect twelve years of accumulated rankings
The old site had 212 indexed URLs. We mapped every one to its closest new equivalent before launch, kept the URL structure for the pages that ranked, and submitted the new sitemap the same morning. Organic sessions dipped for nine days and were back above the old baseline by week three.
What it was built on
- Webflow CMS
- Webflow Forms with routing by practice area
- Finsweet Attributes for filtering
- Cloudflare DNS
- GA4 and Search Console
- Schema.org LegalService markup
The part that surprised me was how much we cut. I came in expecting to add pages and we deleted most of them. Our inquiries are better qualified now, not just more numerous, and I published an article myself last Tuesday without asking anyone for help.