Beautifying this website

As part of my campaign to improve the look of this website, I have decided to move away from the stock photos used on most lawyer websites.  You know what I am talking about:  An image of a gavel or the scales of justice would be the most obvious examples.  Also used are photos of a courtroom, yellow tape from a crime scene, jail bars, or a person in handcuffs. 

Boring, am I right?

I am replacing these photos with two types of images:  D.C. landmarks for web pages and graffiti for web posts.  

For webpages, I now use stock photos of D.C. landmarks.  This is a beautiful city.  The images are instantly recognizable.  And it accentuates the fact that, unlike many of my competitors who also work in Virginia and Maryland, I focus exclusively on D.C.

This is a luxury, I know.  There are not many jurisdictions in which a solo practitioner can earn a living doing criminal defense alone. I recall, for example, that even in a city as big as Philadelphia, many of the criminal defense lawyers had to supplement their income through personal injury, family law or other types of law. 

This can be difficult to do. I have enough trouble staying on top of legal developments in one area of the law in one city.  I cannot imagine doing that for multiple practice areas across different jurisdictions.  Nor do I want to send out conflicting signals with respect to my marketing.  

As for photos of graffiti I have been using on webpages such as this one, the jury is still out.  These are photos I take, and I like how they look. I also like taking them.  For example, although there is one spot in Baltimore in which I find much of my subject matter, it was fun to photograph graffiti during a recent trip to Greece.  

Finally I like what the images of graffiti suggest about my practice:  I do street crime (drugs, bar fights, prostitution, domestic disputes), not “white shoe” law firm stuff.  

Of course I may be deluding myself.  Tyler my website guy was non-committal when I tried to seek out his views.  And although my younger sister responded that she thought the photos were “artistic and eye grabbing” when I asked her about it, she and her husband George like everything I do.  What do they know?