Web design / Wilmington, DE
A small city with a national client list
Wilmington is a small city whose professionals often answer to clients they’ll never meet. Because so many American companies are incorporated in Delaware, the law firms around Rodney Square and the Court of Chancery’s courthouse on King Street work for businesses headquartered everywhere else. A general counsel in Chicago or Austin who needs Delaware counsel will look at your site before the first call, and compare it, without thinking twice, with the sites of firms in Philadelphia and New York.
That’s a hard comparison for a twelve-lawyer firm with a site from 2014. It’s also a winnable one, because the big firms’ sites are often bloated. What a corporate client wants is easy to list: practice areas named the way lawyers name them, attorney bios with bar admissions and representative matters, and a short route to the right partner.
Banks, trust companies and the firms that serve them
Since the early 1980s, when Delaware changed its banking laws, Wilmington has been home to big credit card and banking operations, and a long tail of trust companies, registered agents, compliance consultants and accountants has grown up around them. Their buyers are careful and slightly suspicious. They’ll check who you are, how long you’ve been registered, and whether there’s a real person to call.
Most of these firms don’t need flashy design. They need a brand identity that doesn’t look like it was set in the 1990s, and pages that read as precise. Our guides for law firms and accountants and financial advisers go into the details, including how to write a bio a client will actually finish.
No sales tax, plenty of visitors from over the line
Delaware doesn’t charge sales tax, and shoppers from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland cross the line for it, especially around Christiana Mall. For a store or restaurant near the malls or along Route 202, a good share of the people looking you up don’t live in Delaware. They want hours, parking and directions from I-95, up front and correct.
Inside the city the trade is more local. Trolley Square’s bars and restaurants, the shops along the Riverfront and the Little Italy places that get swamped during St. Anthony’s Italian Festival every June all depend on people nearby searching by neighborhood.
A metro that’s mostly somebody else’s state
On paper Wilmington belongs to the Philadelphia metro. Most of its counties are in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with Cecil County in Maryland tacked on. For a contractor in Hockessin or a dentist in Newark, that’s practical: customers in Chester County and Delaware County, Pennsylvania may be closer than ones in Middletown. If you’re licensed on both sides of the line, say so on the site and list the licenses, because people on the Pennsylvania side don’t assume a Delaware business will come to them. Getting those service-area pages indexed properly is technical SEO work as much as writing.
Students at the University of Delaware in Newark are a market of their own for restaurants, landlords and gyms, and they find everything on a phone.
One question from the First State
Our clients are mostly out of state. Should the site mention Wilmington at all?
Yes. Being in Delaware is often the reason you’re hired, so say where you are and why it matters to the client, then let the practice pages do the rest. Hiding the address to look bigger tends to backfire with careful buyers.
There’s no Wilmington office. We work remotely, a setup that suits firms whose own clients mostly live elsewhere, and keep Eastern hours so a partner can look over a design between Chancery hearings.