Polverini & Wiater: a new firm, a new site, a new start

The short version

Jake Polverini is a litigator in the Ohio Valley. His firm was rebranding, shuffling partners, and changing its name and domain. We built him a professional marketing site and launched it the same day the rebrand went live.

How it started

Jake hired me because he had seen my work on social media and through mutual connections. By the time we talked, he already had a sense of what I did.

Back in June 2023, he asked me to take a look at what his firm had. I put together a full audit video and walked through where his digital presence was falling short, plus ideas for what a real site could do. He did not move on it at the time. That is fine. Good ideas sometimes need the right moment.

The right moment arrived in June 2025. By then, the firm was mid-rebrand. One partner was leaving, another was coming in, and the firm name was changing from Polverini, Norman & Kittle, PLLC to Polverini & Wiater, PLLC. The domain was changing too: pnk-law.com was being retired in favor of pw-legal.com. The old marketing assets no longer matched the business that was about to launch. We signed the build in June. The site went live on September 26, 2025, right alongside the rebrand.

What was broken

The old site was a GoDaddy Website Builder page. You can see a snapshot of it in the before image below. It was a simple homepage with a couple of FAQs and a way to contact the firm. That was it. No real information, no case results, no explanation of practice areas, no story about who the attorneys were.

That is not what a law firm presence looks like when you want to be taken seriously across three states. It just existed.

What we built

A real marketing site. WordPress with Bricks Builder on the backend, which was the stack I was working in at the time. Custom design top to bottom, no template. Dedicated pages for practice areas, case results, FAQs, and contact. A real home page that positions the firm across West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. A clean design that signals competence instead of a shrug.

A note on how this one got built

This is the one project in my business history where I did not personally design and build it.

I scoped it. I learned Jake’s business. I made every structural and strategic decision about the site. I managed the build end-to-end and handled everything on the client side. But the actual development work, I contracted out to a developer I trusted. This was before I fully moved to my AI-driven workflow, and at the time, I did not want to hand-build another site in a visual builder I was already leaving behind.

I mention this for two reasons. One, because my methodology page is built on being honest about how the work gets done, and I would rather name this than pretend. Two, because it is part of why I moved to my current stack. It confirmed for me that I do not want to build this way anymore. Today, with AI, I can do the orchestration and the build myself, faster, with better judgment applied across both.

The rebrand itself

The more interesting strategic piece of this engagement was timing.

Jake was not just getting a new website. He was launching a new firm identity on the same day. New name on the door. New domain pointing at the new site. A whole new public presence for a law practice that had been operating under the old partnership for years. The website had to be the thing that announced it.

We also cleaned up the digital housekeeping that tends to accumulate when a small business buys its own tools over time. Consolidated what we could. Simplified what we could. Removed the GoDaddy add-ons he no longer needed.

Where it goes from here

Jake is a active client on the monthly care plan. I handle site management, updates, and whatever needs to ship.

Here is what is honestly on the table and not yet actioned. Jake has told me he wants to rank higher on Google, and he wants to move his practice more toward civil work and less toward appointed criminal cases. The site does what a marketing site does: it represents the firm properly. What he actually needs next is lead flow into the specific kinds of cases he wants to grow. Right now, the site is not pulling many leads through for that specific work. Not because the site is broken, but because we have not yet built the targeted channels that would feed it.

That is the next chapter. Some mix of local search work, targeted campaigns for the civil practice areas, and a look at where the firm’s manual operations could be tightened up with better tooling. There are real compliance considerations in legal that make some of this more delicate than a landscaping or engineering shop, but the path is clear enough.

For now: the site is live, the rebrand landed, and the door is wide open when Jake wants to start on the next piece.