Cabinet Simon Paëz

A law firm whose website no longer said what the firm did. The positioning had moved towards international business matters, the online presentation had stayed on a generalist message, and a visitor arriving could not tell they were dealing with a specialist.

The problem was therefore not aesthetic. It was substantive: the site described a profession, not a position within that profession.

We took up the positioning before touching the design. The site became a single page that unfolds, built in a reading order: what the firm brings, to whom, in what situations, then who is behind it.

The art direction was designed for this firm and for no other. Two directions were explored, “The Threshold” and “Ink & Stone”, and the synthesis we kept sets a sober register, dense in text, without the visual codes expected of the legal sector.

An “In the media” block was added to carry a television appearance by the client, playing directly on the page rather than as an outbound link. The proof stays on the site instead of sending the visitor elsewhere.

No purchased theme, no off-the-shelf template. The site is written for this firm, and it shows in details nobody notices consciously: the length of the text lines, the rhythm of the sections, the absence of effects that would cost it its seriousness.

One decision deserves telling, because it goes against the usual practice. The brief called for a stripped-back menu where the fees disappeared into a submenu. We moved them up to a top-level link. In a profession where price is the visitor's first worry, showing it is an argument for trust, not a weakness.

On the editing side, the client changes his own content through simple fields. The standard block editor was switched off on the templates, precisely so that no edit can break the layout.

The site responds in 0.15 seconds, measured on 8 September 2026. It is a technical figure and it has a direct effect: a visitor who waits leaves, and on a first commercial contact they do not come back.

Beyond speed, the change is one of nature. A visitor arriving understands within seconds that this is a specialist firm, which was not the case before. The expected consequence is not more enquiries, it is fewer irrelevant ones and more qualified requests.

Fee transparency works the same way: it filters out enquiries that would go nowhere, and reassures those that will.

The firm already had a site when we came in. The first version we delivered answered the original brief, and it was the client's feedback that revealed the real subject: the positioning had changed, not just the presentation.

So we rebuilt the home page on a revised brief, with a backup copy of the previous version kept. It is a precaution we always take: redoing something is only acceptable if going back remains possible.

Every piece of client feedback is followed ticket by ticket, on a shared board where he can see the state of each. That avoids the most painful situation in acceptance testing, the one where nobody knows any more what was asked for or what has been handled.

The first concerns the fees. The brief made them disappear into a submenu, in the name of a clean design. They were moved up to a top-level link. In a profession where price is the first worry, hiding it reassures nobody.

The second concerns the video block. A television appearance by the client first carried a gold badge recalling the channel. We removed it: the channel's own overlay was already in the video, and the badge duplicated it. Proof shown twice loses its force.

The third concerns the phone. The booking button crowded the header on a small screen, to the point of pushing the logo against the menu. It was hidden below a certain width, with booking still reachable from the first screen and from the menu. On mobile, space is worth more than one more button.