We’d been searching for a lawyer-based/attorney website design project we could use as a test case for the excellent WordPress theme/framework called Thesis, and here’s our test case: my brother’s civil rights law firm in Atlanta, Georgia.

Most of our clients need a larger-scale, robust content management system (CMS). For those types of clients, we recommend the awesome MODx and Drupal products on the market. But we also sometimes work with attorneys, law firms, and other smaller, services-oriented companies that don’t need all the bells and whistles. Enter WordPress and Thesis.

WordPress is the blog platform of choice for PatrickOrtman, Inc. We’ve been using it for years now. And Thesis is an add-on to WordPress that lets us create WordPress-based websites easily and creatively. Thesis extends WordPress, and makes it a more viable website platform for smaller clients and companies.

For the Bad Badges website, our vision was a gritty, pulp fiction meets noir web design. We layered graphics including a police badge, barbed wire, and an American flag to create the graphical elements repeated throughout the site, and we went with a stark, grainy black and white style throughout.

The best thing about websites like this, created with WordPress and Thesis, is that it allows smaller clients to maintain and update their own custom-designed, web standards-based, search engine friendly websites like bigger companies have been doing for some time now. This is huge, and we’re excited that our little experiment turned out so well.