Martine Mamvibidila

An experienced family lawyer relaunching her practice on her own. Martine Mamvibidila has been at the Brussels bar since 2004, and family law is about 80 percent of her work. For years she practised within a cost-sharing group of eleven lawyers, whose website gave each lawyer a profile page listing their practice areas. For experienced lawyers with a stable clientele, that was enough. In January 2026 she relaunched as a solo practitioner, and a profile on someone else’s site was no longer enough. This page is how we built one, from the name on the door to the emails that now land in her inbox.

The Challenge

A solo practice needs its own presence, and hers had none yet: no website, no domain, no visual identity, and no page that explained in any detail the matters she handles. Family law in Brussels runs on referrals, and her practice always had. What has changed is the step right after the referral. Someone passes on a name, and the person looks it up on their phone before calling. There was nothing of her own to find.

Launching a new practice site is not the same problem as a redesign. There is no traffic to protect, no legacy URL to preserve, no brand to respect. There is also no authority to inherit: a new domain starts at zero in Google’s eyes, and legal search in Brussels is held by firms that have been publishing for a decade.

What had to be solved:

• Build a brand, a domain, a site and a contact pipeline for a practice in her own name
• Give a domain with no history a realistic way to rank against ten years of published content
• Explain family law to people in the worst week of their life, without the jargon that sends them back to Google
• Show a practice that is not only divorce: filiation, parental authority, civil status, nationality and international family files
• Be transparent about cost without publishing a rate that would be wrong for half the cases
• Look like this practice and this city, not like the blue, uniform template every law firm defaults to

What We Explained

The question a professional arrives with is rarely which CMS to use. It is what a website actually does for a practice that already has clients, and how to tell a serious proposal from an expensive one. Our answer came down to three things, and they became the project.

A website is a conversion problem, not a decoration problem. Out of a hundred people who land on the site, how many call? On an architecture practice we run, seven visitors in a hundred make contact and one of those seven signs a project. That is the number the work has to move, and every design decision after it is only a means.

A new domain cannot win the obvious keyword, so it should not try. We ran the search data before proposing anything: “avocat bruxelles” carries hundreds of searches a month and belongs to firms that have been publishing for a decade. The openings were in the long tail, on the precise matters most firms never bother to write a page about.

Which is why twenty pages, and not five. A five page showcase would have had nothing to rank and nothing to say. One page per practice area gives a brand new domain fourteen honest reasons to be found, and gives a visitor the page that matches their own situation instead of a generic list.

What We Built

Through our web design and development service, we delivered the whole layer between her practice and the people looking for it.

A brand built around her name. Family law in Belgium is a personal practice, not a corporate one, so the identity had to be hers: logo and wordmark around a tree whose branches carry the practice areas, a type system, and a warm terracotta and ochre palette chosen deliberately against the blue and green that every other law firm defaults to.

A domain chosen on search data, not on taste. The instinct was to register her name. We ran the keyword research first and found that the phrase people type is “avocat famille bruxelles”, while “avocat familial” has no measurable volume at all. The site lives at avocat-famille-bruxelles.be, which is what her future clients are already searching for.

Twenty pages, fourteen of them practice areas. Divorce and separation, children and parental authority, maintenance contributions, filiation and surrogacy recognition, civil status and foreign deeds, nationality and statelessness, intrafamily violence, international family law, international child abduction, expatriation with minor children, liquidation and division, de facto couples. Each one is a real page with its own title, its own structured data and its own entry point from search, not a paragraph in a list.

Legal content written to be understood. Every page went through the same rule: say the legal thing correctly, then say it in words a frightened person can follow. Inclusive writing throughout, which for a practice covering every family configuration is not a stylistic choice.

Fees stated exactly where they can be honest. One published price, the first consultation at 150 euros including tax, then an explanation of how a file is quoted and when legal aid applies. No hourly rate that would be wrong for half her cases.

Astro, and a build measured in weeks. The site is static, generated with Astro and served from Cloudflare’s edge: no database, no plugin stack, nothing to patch on a Tuesday night. That choice is also why it went up fast. The brand, the structure and a full twenty page draft were ready about six weeks after the first meeting. The months that followed were legal review, not development.

A homepage built to convert, not to decorate. The situations people actually arrive with come first, divorce, children, money and housing, in that order, then the experience behind the practice, then the ways to reach her. The call back request is one tap away from anywhere on the page, and every practice area is one click from the top of the site.

A contact path for people who will not fill in a form. Call, WhatsApp, email and a call back request that sits in a modal on every page, so the visitor never has to navigate to ask for a phone call. The form runs on a Cloudflare Pages Function with bot filtering, sends through Brevo, and posts from a dedicated address on her own domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place. Cloudflare Email Routing forwards everything to the inbox she already uses, so there is no second mailbox to check.

A LinkedIn profile that matches the site. Banner, headline, about section, experience, skills and services, rebuilt in the same voice and linked from the header and footer.

The Content Process

The part that made this project work was not technical. Legal copy cannot be approved in a review call: a lawyer needs to read every line and correct the words that carry liability.

So we exported the entire site, page by page in menu order, into a single shared Google Doc. Corrections were made directly in that document, in the margins and in the text, and integrated back into the site from there. A Word round trip was ruled out at the start: one document, one version, no attachments crossing in the post.

Four full review passes ran between July and September, the last two in that document, from terminology fixes to a final page by page read of the finished site. The last round came back with eight items, including one that only a lawyer would catch: the reference to article 1321 of the Judicial Code had been split across five fragments by a card link wrapping another link. It is fixed on the page today.

The Results

Live in September 2026, nine months after she reopened as a solo practitioner, with every matter she handles explained on a site of her own.

99/100 on mobile, 100/100 on desktop, measured on PageSpeed Insights in September 2026, with 100/100 on accessibility, best practices and SEO. Static pages built with Astro and served from Cloudflare’s edge, so there is no plugin stack to maintain and nothing to patch on a Tuesday night.

Fourteen doors into the practice. Attorney and breadcrumb structured data on every page, a clean sitemap, and one indexable page for each type of case she actually handles, which is how a brand new domain earns its first rankings in local search.

Room to grow, by design. Fourteen practice area pages already cover a long tail of queries that most firms in this niche leave unclaimed, and the structure takes new matters, new pages and articles without touching the stack. On a domain registered in September 2026, that headroom is where the next rankings come from.

An English version went live in September 2026, mapped page for page onto the French site, for the international families who make up a growing share of her files.

What This Project Is Really About

Nobody chooses a family lawyer from an advertisement. They read, they decide whether this person will understand them, and then they call. The site does not try to sell. It explains the law in plain words, shows who is going to sit across the table, and puts a phone number one tap away on every screen.

That is the whole brief for a professional services website, and it is worth more than any feature list.