Upgrading an Attorney Website in Albany, Oregon: The Miller Castleton & Flinn Redesign

When Attorney Dan Miller reached out to us, his firm’s website had some real problems. Both cosmetic ones and the kind that quietly cost a law firm clients, credibility, and search visibility all at once.

This is the story of how we rebuilt it from the ground up — and then rebuilt the brand on top of it when the partnership changed.

What Was Wrong with the Old Site

The old site wasn’t broken in one obvious way. It was broken in several compounding ways, which is actually the harder problem to solve.

Load times were slow. On mobile, the layout didn’t render well. Text sat over light images with poor contrast, which isn’t just a design problem — it’s an accessibility failure. If someone using a screen reader or struggling with low vision visits your site and can’t read it, that’s a real person you’ve turned away. For a law firm serving the Albany, Oregon community, that matters.

The content itself was stale. Outdated attorney profiles, old staff information, services that no longer reflected what the firm actually does. A prospective client doing their homework is going to notice that. It signals that nobody’s paying attention, and in the legal world, attention to detail is the whole game.

And the photography was generic stock images. No connection to Albany, to the firm, or to the people inside it. It looked like any law firm anywhere, which means it didn’t really look like this firm at all.

Before After

What We Built Instead

We don’t start design projects with a template and work backwards. We start with the client.

The starting point here was obvious once we looked at their building. They’re located at 317 W 1st Ave in downtown Albany, in a building with genuine art-deco character. That became the creative direction for the entire site.

The design pulls from that architectural style: bold lines, structured layouts, corner detailing, a sense of established authority. Dan wanted real color rather than the safe grey-and-blue every firm defaults to, and the site has carried a deco palette since launch — deep purple and gold originally, and navy and gold today. A visitor landing on that site knows immediately it isn’t a template. It looks like a firm with a point of view.

We sourced photos of the building and the surrounding downtown Albany area. Real places. Real community. The difference between those images and stock photography is the difference between a firm that’s rooted here and one that could be anywhere.

The firm is also active in the community, and that mattered to them. We built sections into the site specifically to highlight the organizations they support — ABC House, Safe Haven Humane Society, the Albany Downtown Association, and others. That’s not decoration. That’s a firm telling you what they value, and for a lot of prospective clients, that’s exactly what builds trust before the first phone call.

When the Firm Became Miller Castleton & Flinn

Partway through this relationship, the practice changed shape. Sarah Castleton and Mike Flinn came on as partners alongside Dan Miller, and the Law Office of Ivers & Miller became Miller Castleton & Flinn.

A name change is one of the most expensive things that can happen to a website — if the site is built badly. Firms in this position routinely get quoted a full rebuild, because the old name is welded into the theme, the images, and the content.

It wasn’t here. The site moved to the new name and a new navy-and-gold identity on the existing structure: new wordmark, new palette, updated attorney bios, and a new domain at mcf-legal.net. The deco framework we designed around the building still holds, because it was built around the building — not around a logo.

The positioning got sharper in the process. The firm now leads with “Attorneys practicing since 1995” and “Mid-Valley attorneys with Mid-Valley values” — thirteen people, six practice areas spanning family law, personal injury, criminal defense, civil litigation, estate planning, and business, and licensure across all thirty-six Oregon counties. That’s a considerably stronger story than the old site was telling, and the structure was already there to hold it.

Built to Perform, Not Just Look Good

A good-looking site that loads slowly is still a problem. We built this one to be fast.

The site scores exceptionally well on Google PageSpeed. That’s not a small thing. Page speed is a ranking factor, and it affects whether visitors stay or leave. Slow sites lose people in the first few seconds. When you’re a law firm and someone is searching at 9pm trying to figure out who to call tomorrow morning, you need that site to load immediately and answer their questions clearly.

We also built the site around current best practices for SEO, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and Local Search. That means the structure, the content, and the technical foundation are all set up to be found by the right people in the right places.

To close the loop on performance, we connected Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The site isn’t just live; it’s measurable and ready to grow when the practice is ready to push.

What This Means for Your Business

If your website is running on old information, loading slowly, or using photos that could belong to anyone, it’s working against you. Not dramatically. Just steadily.

And if it’s built well, it survives the things you can’t schedule — a new partner, a new name, a new direction. Miller Castleton & Flinn is a good example of both: what happens when you take design seriously, build from the actual character of a business, and back it up with technical fundamentals that hold up over time.

If your site needs the same kind of attention, we’d be glad to take a look. See our website design packages or schedule a call and we’ll tell you honestly what we think.

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Deep River Digital is a website design and digital marketing agency serving Albany, Corvallis, Eugene, Portland, and the surrounding Pacific Northwest region.