Salt City Defense

The record was strong.
The site wasn't carrying it.

Cliff Venable has spent over a decade in Salt Lake City courtrooms building the kind of track record other attorneys refer clients to. None of that showed up online. The old site ran on a stock template — recycled gavel photography, copy that could've belonged to any firm in any city, and a homepage that buried the one thing a prospective client actually wants to know first: has this attorney won cases like mine.

Underneath, the technical foundation was worse than the surface. No schema markup, a flat page structure with no practice-area hierarchy, and a mobile load time slow enough to lose someone before the phone number even rendered.

Serious, without the
marble columns.

Criminal defense branding defaults to gavels, scales, and navy blue. We went the other way: a restrained serif, architectural photography, and a muted charcoal-and-gold palette that reads credible rather than costumed — the visual language a client actually trusts when they're scared and looking for help.

Mapped to intent,
not squeezed into a dropdown.

Keyword research came first. Every practice area the firm actually handles got its own page, mapped to the exact terms a prospective client types into Google at 2am — not stacked onto one overloaded services page behind a dropdown. Attorney bio, case results, and the contact path were tested for friction at every step; the old sitemap buried them nine screens deep and lost people along the way.