Short answer: An Indiana lawyer website redesign tends to make required disclosures less visible, not more. A modern rebuild favours whitespace, light grey secondary text and collapsed accordions, and disclosures get filed into exactly those treatments — still technically present, considerably harder to notice. Indiana is a useful state to work this through in, because the expectation that a required disclosure actually be conspicuous is one almost no firm tests properly. This guide sets out how to keep disclosures visible through a rebuild.
Present and noticeable are different standards. A redesign usually improves the first and quietly damages the second.
What Indiana adds to a redesign
Indiana governs lawyer advertising through Rules 7.1 through 7.5 of the Indiana Rules of Professional Conduct, with the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission administering enforcement. We work through the conspicuousness question in the Indiana attorney advertising rules guide.
This guide does not state what Indiana currently requires to be disclosed, in what wording, or where. Those change and are the expensive thing to get wrong from a template — confirm them with the Disciplinary Commission or your ethics counsel before launch.
The redesign-specific point is that conspicuousness is a design property, and a redesign is by definition the moment every design property is reset. Nobody decides to make a disclosure less visible. It becomes less visible because the new theme renders secondary text at a lighter weight, because the footer got tidier, or because a designer put it inside a collapsed panel to keep the page clean.
The treatments that quietly bury a disclosure
| Design treatment | Why it happens | Effect on a reader |
|---|---|---|
| Light grey small text | Theme’s secondary text style | Reads as boilerplate, skipped |
| Collapsed accordion | Keeps the page clean | Requires a click to exist |
| Below the footer fold | Footer is where legal text goes | Never reached on mobile |
| Inside a modal | Tidy on desktop | Often unreachable on a phone |
| In an image | Designed as part of a banner | Invisible to screen readers |
| Only on the home page | Added once, not templated | Absent where it is needed |
The last two rows are the ones with consequences beyond visibility. Text baked into an image is not text at all — it cannot be read by assistive technology, selected, searched or indexed. And a disclosure added to one page rather than built into the relevant template will be missing from every page created afterwards, which on a growing site means most of them.
Specify it as a design requirement, not a legal afterthought
The sequencing failure is the same one that causes most compliance problems in a rebuild. A design is produced, approved on how it looks, and required elements are appended to whatever space remains — which is why they end up small, grey and at the bottom.
Reverse it. Before the first mockup, tell the designer which disclosures must appear, on which page types, and that each must be readable at arm’s length on a phone without zooming. That is a layout constraint in exactly the way a logo or a phone number is. A design with nowhere for it to go is an incomplete design.
Three specific instructions cover most of it. Disclosures are real text, never part of an image. They are visible without interaction — no accordion, no modal, no hover. And they live in the template for the page type rather than being pasted onto individual pages, so pages created next year inherit them.
Test it the way a reader would
Most compliance review is done by someone who knows the disclosure is there and is checking that it is. That tests presence, which was never the question.
A better test during an Indiana lawyer website redesign: hand a phone to somebody who has not seen the site, ask them to read the page as they normally would, and then ask what qualifications or notices they noticed. If they noticed none, the disclosure is present and not conspicuous, whatever the checklist said.
Run the check on staging, on a real phone rather than a resized browser window, on every page type — home, practice area, results, bio, blog, contact, and any landing pages rebuilt alongside. Then confirm with your ethics counsel that what you have built meets the current requirement, before launch, when changing a template is an hour of work.
Indiana lawyer website redesign: frequently asked questions
Do disclaimers survive a website redesign?
Often they survive in the sense of being present and fail in the sense of being noticeable, because a new theme renders secondary text differently and designers file legal text into whitespace-friendly treatments. Both properties need checking.
Can a required disclosure sit inside an accordion?
An element that requires a click to exist is a different thing from one a reader encounters. Whether a particular presentation satisfies Indiana’s expectations is a question for the Disciplinary Commission and your ethics counsel; as a design matter, hidden-by-default is worth avoiding.
Should disclosure text ever be part of an image?
No. Text in an image cannot be read by assistive technology, selected, searched or indexed, and it does not scale on small screens. Keep it as real text in the page.
How do I test whether a disclosure is conspicuous?
Ask someone unfamiliar with the site to read a page on a phone and then say what notices they saw. Testing whether a reviewer who knows where it is can find it answers a different question.
How long does an Indiana lawyer website redesign take?
Eight to sixteen weeks. Specifying disclosure treatment at brief stage costs nothing; retrofitting it after a layout is approved costs a round of design revisions.
Indiana lawyer website redesign: the short version
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: open your new site on a phone in daylight and try to read the disclaimer without zooming. If you cannot, it has been handled by a stylesheet rather than by a decision — and that is the one compliance element a redesign reliably makes worse rather than better.
Official source: the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission.
Legal Web Agency is a marketing agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Nothing here states what Indiana requires to be disclosed, in what wording, or where. Confirm current requirements with the Disciplinary Commission or your ethics counsel.
Related reading: Law Firm Website Redesign: Complete 2026 Guide, plus the Indiana advertising rules guide and the Missouri guide on prescribed wording.
