About
One person, named, doing the work.
I am David Estrada. I build brands and websites for Texas law firms. If you hire Estrada Marketing you will not meet a strategist in the pitch and a contractor in the build.
How I got here
I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and studied at UT Rio Grande Valley. My first marketing job was an internship at the American Heart Association in Dallas in 2008. The career started properly in 2010 at Verizon, then five years inside The Dallas Morning News and Al Día, watching how attention actually gets bought and sold in this state. Then agency work. Then this.
The useful part of that path is the newspaper years. Selling advertising in Dallas means sitting across from owner-operators spending their own money, who can tell in about a minute whether you understand their business. Attorneys are the same audience with a bar card. Nobody translates a proposal for them, and nobody approves their budget. They read it and they decide.
Since then the work has been Texas firms almost exclusively: family law, estate and probate, and dispute resolution. The packages are shaped the way they are because I have done the same job repeatedly and learned where it goes wrong.
The thing I had to learn the hard way
Nobody visits your website to admire it
Early on I treated every website as a design problem. Get the layout right, get the type right, ship it. Some of those sites went live and did nothing, and I could not work out why, because they were good-looking sites.
What I was missing is that nobody visits a small firm's website to admire it. They arrive already half-decided, holding a name they got from somewhere else, looking for a reason to go ahead or to keep looking. Every visitor is running that one test. A site that never considered the test can be beautiful and still lose.
So the work starts with the test rather than the layout. Who is arriving, what they already believe, and what the page has to settle before they will call. The design comes after that, and it comes out better for it.
How I work
You talk to me, and only me
There is no account manager between you and the work, and no junior learning on your project. That is a hard limit on how many firms I take at once, and why the packages are scoped tightly rather than sold open-ended.
The price comes before the work
Agreed in writing, in advance, and it does not move because the project turned out to be more interesting than expected. You are already selling your own time by the hour. You should not have to buy someone else's that way.
You get the final read on every word
You are the one held to the bar rules, so nothing goes live that you have not approved. If a line makes you uneasy, it comes out, and I will not argue you into keeping it.
The project has an end
Every package finishes. The monthly retainer exists for firms who want someone still on it afterwards, and no build depends on you taking it.
What keeps me interested is that a small firm can be genuinely better than a large one and lose to it anyway, on nothing more than presentation. That gap is closable, at a knowable price, in a finite amount of time. Not many problems are.