Thornbury & Finch
Thornbury & Finch is an estate planning and elder law practice in Birmingham, Michigan. We delivered the complete web presence: brand identity, a quiet-luxury editorial design, nine pages of fully written content, a working lead pipeline, downloadable client guides, and an ongoing content and search program.
Creative & Technical
Brand, Design, Development & SEO
Launched June 2026. Content & SEO program ongoing.
100% Custom Design System
The Challenge
Understanding the problem space and identifying key obstacles.
Estate planning is one of the hardest categories on the web. The audience is anxious, the subject is complex, the competition is entrenched, and trust has to be earned in the first few seconds. Most law firm websites answer that pressure with the same template: stock gavel photos, dense legalese, and a contact form nobody believes.
The brief was to do the opposite: build a presence that feels like the firm itself, calm, unhurried, and precise, while competing for real search visibility in a market where established firms have years of head start. That meant genuine content depth, technical excellence, and a design with an actual point of view, not a theme.
Plans that hold up when your family needs them.
The Solution
Our approach to solving the challenge through design and technology.
We treated the entire presence as one product: brand, design, content, and search working together.
How we built it
- ✓
Editorial design system: Hand-written CSS with its own tokens, a Fraunces and Source Serif pairing, a brass-and-forest palette, and SVG line art. No component library anywhere on the site.
- ✓
Content as the product: Four practice pages and a growing insights section, all Michigan-specific, all structured to answer the exact questions families search for, from Lady Bird deeds to probate timelines.
- ✓
A complete lead pipeline: Client-side validation, spam protection, database persistence, and instant email notification, with the form degrading gracefully if any downstream service fails.
- ✓
Search infrastructure: Per-page metadata and canonicals, LegalService, Person, FAQPage, Article, and Breadcrumb schema, llms.txt for AI engines, and a weekly publishing cadence against a researched Michigan keyword strategy.
Experience It Live
Tour the live site: the editorial design, the practice pages, the insights section, and the lead flow, all running in production.
Quiet-luxury editorial design with a hand-built CSS system
Working lead pipeline: database plus instant email notification
Insights section targeting real Michigan search queries
Full structured data and weekly publishing cadence
Performance That Matters
Built for speed and optimized for every device. Real metrics from real users.
Estate planning research happens on phones, often quietly, so the mobile experience carries most of the load.
Reading first The editorial typography scales cleanly to small screens, and long-form practice pages stay comfortable through generous rhythm and clear hierarchy.
Fast everywhere With static rendering, no third-party requests, and vector-only artwork, the site is effectively instant on mobile connections.
Accessible throughout WCAG AA contrast, visible focus states, a fully accessible mobile navigation, and reduced-motion support come standard.
Measurable Impact
Hand-authored CSS, self-hosted serifs, and SVG-only artwork. No templates.
WCAG AA contrast, focus states, and reduced-motion support across the site.
New Michigan-specific insights publish on a steady cadence against a keyword strategy.
Ready to Create Something Extraordinary?
Let's work together to build a solution that drives real results for your business.