Your personal injury law practice needs a website as an online brochure, but how do you pick a domain name for your law firm’s web site? What exactly is a domain name?

Your web site is located by an IP (Internet Protocol) address and looks like this http://67.15.4.94. Instead of typing a series of numbers which are difficult to remember, you can register an easier to remember domain name which becomes associated with your IP address. Similar to a 1-800 vanity phone number, some domain names pertain to the subject of the web site, while others may simply be the name or an abbreviation of your law firm.

For instance, lawyer-advertising-blog.com is the registered domain name for my blog, which is obviously for lawyer advertising. When you type that domain name, the domain name servers on the Internet know that you’re looking for http://67.15.4.94 and take you there. You can have multiple domain names pointing to the same web site.

I get calls every week from lawyers saying they’re not getting calls anymore from yellow page advertising. They don’t want to continue wasting their money, but they’re afraid to stop advertising and lose their spot. They want to know what’s going on and what to do.

Apparently, lawyers are not the only ones. In his article “Quit wasting money on Yellow Page advertising” by Peter Fernandez, D.C., a yellow page, print advertising and practice management consultant for chiropractors, Dr. Fernandez answers the question, “Why has advertising in the Yellow Pages changed from one of the best ways to advertise to one of the worst in just a few years?”

Additionally, Dr. Lynella Grant, author of “Yellow Page Smarts Snags More Callers” in her article “Yellow Page Advertisers: Your Calls are Going to Decrease – Here’s the Remedy” states, “Response rates to Yellow Page advertising are declining. There’s no getting around it, traditional Yellow Pages are in trouble. Fewer people use them every year. Even the best-pulling ad in the section isn’t getting the number of callers or sales it used to. At the same time, the monthly cost to maintain your same-size directory ad keeps going up.” “Some (like contractors and lawyers) are declining more steeply than others.” “Advertising only in the Yellow Pages is no longer a safe bet”.