.band — reviews and locations, layout options
Eight treatments for the strip that sits directly under the hero. Every one carries the same
verified facts; what changes is what the band is for.
Four defects found before drawing anything — these are true of the band as it stands
- Nanaimo is missing. The sentence names Victoria, Vancouver, Duncan, Campbell River and
Kelowna — five. The site has six published location pages under
Contact Our Lawyers, and Nanaimo is one of them. This is a real office left off the
homepage, not a wording preference.
- The six offices are prose, and none of them is a link. Every one has its own page. The
band names them and sends you nowhere.
- The Google link is a dead 2019 search URL. The live site's “Read reviews on
Google” points at a copy-pasted results page carrying session parameters from 2019
(
ei=D3LGXP6wOpX99QPiuaawBg). The durable part buried in it is the place id, so
every option here links to google.com/maps?cid=3427224649634314500 instead
— derived from that id, and stable.
- The Google mark is an invented letterform. The replica sets a bold “G” in
Open Sans at 44px. The live site uses the actual
fa-google icon. Every option
here uses the icon.
The rating is a hardcoded string, and nothing keeps it true
4.9 and 173 Google Reviews are typed into a WordPress block. No API, no cache, no
refresh — the number was correct on the day someone typed it and has been drifting ever since.
Every option below repeats it because it is what the site says, but a review count that cannot
update is a number that will eventually be wrong in public. Either pull it from the Places API,
or drop the count and keep the rating and the link.
One colour to collapse. home-v2 paints the dark half with --band-dark #453F39;
the live site uses #423c37, which is the brand's own --brown. The two
measure 1.05:1 against each other — indistinguishable. --band-dark is a
near-duplicate that exists for no reason and is one of the five dark values already flagged in
home-v2. Every option here uses --brown.
What the band could be. It is the first thing after the fold and it currently spends 128px on
one rating and one sentence. B1 just fixes the defects; B2, B3, B4, B6, B7 and B8 turn the offices
into navigation; B3 and B7 give the phone number a home outside the header; B5 says the rating
properly. The heights run 88px to 168px against today's 128px.
B1Baseline, corrected — same shape, four defects fixed128pxThe band exactly as home-v2 carries it, with only the things that were plainly wrong put right: Nanaimo is in the sentence, the Google mark is the real icon rather than an invented letterform, the reviews link points somewhere durable, and the band's colour is the brand brown.
No layout decision here at all — if none of the options below wins, these four fixes should still ship.
Get our lawyers on your team
Headquartered in Victoria, BC with offices in Vancouver, Nanaimo, Duncan, Campbell River and Kelowna, we serve clients from around the world with legal issues in BC Read more
B2Office directory — the six become links128pxThe blurb is replaced by the thing it was describing. All six offices have real pages and the band named five of them in prose without linking any; here each is a link. Same height, and the band stops being decoration.
It drops the sentence “we serve clients from around the world with legal issues in BC”, which is a claim the list alone does not make. That sentence would have to move somewhere — the contact page, or the footer.
Six offices across British Columbia
B3Three parts — reviews, offices, and the phone128pxThe number the whole site is trying to get people to call currently lives only in the header. Here it gets a third of the band, with the free-consultation line the firm already publishes elsewhere. Reviews shrink to a rating and a count.
“Free consultations” is the firm's own line but it applies only to personal injury and estate litigation. It is written that way here; it must not be shortened to a bare “free consultations”.
CALL NOW
250-888-0002
Free consultations on injury and estate matters
B4One dark band — the orange block goes118pxDrops the two-colour split. The orange currently carries the rating simply because it is the loud half; here the whole band is brown and the orange is spent on the stars and the door instead. Ten pixels shorter and considerably calmer under a photographic hero.
The split is on the live site and is one of the few places the brand orange appears at full width. Removing it is a brand decision, not only a layout one.
Six offices across British Columbia
B5Taller — the rating said properly, offices in two rows of three168px4.9 at 52px stops being a footnote. The six offices tile three-across in two rows with a hexagon marker each, so the list reads as a map rather than a sentence. The most confident version of the band.
40px taller than the current band, immediately under a hero that already fills the first screen. That is the whole cost; there is nothing else wrong with it.
Get our lawyers on your team — six offices in BC
B6Hexagon rating badge — the mark carries the number148pxThe rating sits inside the brand hexagon instead of a rectangle of orange, which is the one place in this band where the mark can do structural work. Everything else is a single dark field, so the hexagon is the only bright thing in it.
Uses the character ★ for the stars rather than FontAwesome, because five FA icons at this size crowd inside a hexagon's narrowing sides. If the icon set is ever redrawn as SVG this should follow.
4.9★★★★★
Six offices across British Columbia
B7Compact — everything on one 88px line88px40px shorter than the current band. Rating, six office links and the phone all sit on a single line, so the band becomes a rule between the hero and the practice areas rather than a block of its own.
At 1280px this fits with room to spare, but it is the option with the least slack: a seventh office or a longer phone format would break it onto two lines.
B8Two strips — reviews over offices, each full width144pxStops the two messages competing for the same horizontal line. Reviews get a full-width orange strip, offices a full-width brown one. Each is legible in one pass instead of two columns read in parallel.
16px taller than the current band and it doubles the number of horizontal rules across the page at that point — hero edge, strip seam, strip bottom, then the practice areas.