Anatomy of a Law Firm Website (Re)Design

September 24, 2014
Susan Van Dyke

Have you ever visited a website that completely changed your opinion of that business, for better or worse? Chances are the experience not only affected your overall impression but your willingness to purchase anything from that business, now or in the future.

With the rate of Internet use in Canada astonishingly high, it’s safe to suggest that almost all your clients have visited your website at least once. It’s even more likely that your prospective clients, laterals and students will use your site to either form an opinion or validate their assumptions about your firm.

The development of a website is not a static exercise—it’s not an item that can ever be ticked off your to-do list. Not only does the site’s content require regular review and updating, the site as a whole—the graphics, functionality, keywords and navigation—should be reviewed for its ability to meet the needs of users.

No doubt this is a challenging playing field. The Internet comes with its own language, behaviour and is highly technical in some areas.

There are many aspects to an online profile: Internet service providers (ISP), web analytics (visitor behaviour), strategy, content, search engine marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), e-mail marketing, social media, on-site behavioural targeting, multivariate testing, blogs and so much more. And to drive us further into a frothing frenzy, it changes every nanosecond. So, we lean heavily on others to guide us through the jungle of what can appear to be a web of complex, and sometimes costly, decisions.

Let’s begin by breaking down the parts and consider, in plain terms, the best practices for planning, implementing and deploying a new or renovated online presence.

To Revamp or Start Anew?

Unlike most marketing activities, your website needs regular feeding and care. Left neglected for too long, like a luxury car left on the street, exposed to the elements and not driven, your website will, ultimately, diminish in value. A key indication your site is ready for a critical review is when lawyers are no longer using the site to promote themselves, their colleagues or their services in general. This is usually symptomatic that your site is out of date, difficult to use, slow to load or any other issue that can render your site a disappointment. You should be concerned if your lawyers are no longer engaged in the site, or if it lacks a champion.

The most common use of a website goes something like this: lawyers meet a prospective client, or make a formal pitch for a piece of work. The targeted company, or client, conduct their due diligence on the firm and lawyer(s); they speak to colleagues who’ve used their legal services and then, almost without fail now, they review the firm’s website.

If your website doesn’t reflect your recent work, your involvement in key industries, your understanding of their business, then your site has failed to function as a critical validation tool. All the upfront efforts to drive the qualified prospect to the final “buying decision” were for nothing.

A client or prospect shouldn’t have to work or search too hard to see that you’re qualified to do their work well. You need to make it easy and clear – remove any doubt – that you have the required experience and expertise. Too many mid-level to senior partners are cavalier about updating their biographies, which are the most popular law firm web pages, bar none. If you do anything, make it your practice to review your biography every quarter. Have your assistant actually calendarize this task and take a first pass at updating it.

Here are a few things to consider while pondering whether to revamp your existing site or create a new one:

Make it user-friendly
From their first visit, users will develop a strong opinion of how easily they can access the information they seek and whether they pick up additional relevant information. This first experience will set the tone for future site use. Anticipate the most commonly accessed pages and make them easily accessible by placing them on the main navigational bar. Think like a user, not like a lawyer.

Stay on-brand and on-message
Your new or updated site must authentically reflect your firm and its brand. Small and mid-sized firms can take direction from current collateral materials such as a firm brochure, newsletter or even a business card, provided they accurately represent the firm.

Large firms will be best served to establish, or follow, a strong corporate identity which will provide the basis for your website’s design direction. A website, though, is a good medium to take a few design risks before the site goes live. Unlike its hard copy cousins – the firm’s print materials – it’s easy to make colour or graphical changes to your site.

A firm with a strong focus on corporate law will speak directly to their core issues without a lot of extraneous information—time is a significant factor. If your main target market is the entrepreneurial set, you might include helpful resources such links to industry associations or timely articles on areas of concern.

The site’s visual components should also resonate with users. Strong and clear visual cues lead a user through a site effortlessly and help to make navigating intuitive. Brand colours are typically chosen for a firm’s online presence and accent colours will often help to guide users. Student recruitment sections can be a more lively and interactive variation of the main site in order to appeal to the web-savvy generation.

Use it to recruit
Today’s generation of law students use the web as a powerful source of legal research and information on job prospects. It’s also an effective tool for communications with students, associates and laterals. Some HR departments appreciate the ability to efficiently post staff and professionals’ positions and receive resumes via the website. Again, the students’ section of the site can and should differ somewhat from the main site to appeal to this segmented market.

Just as important are your future lateral hires. How you guide this select group of individuals through your site could affect their impression of your firm.

Make it a stage for more marketing
Your website should become the hub for the firm’s newsletters, seminars and e-marketing programs. Consider how your site’s database can serve your future needs and how it can relate or interact with your current marketing database, and think about where you can benefit from technological efficiencies. Build for the future.

Identify your experts
All users, whether they are clients, prospects, recruits or even your own lawyers and staff, will be able to conveniently identify the best person on a specific subject of law. Imagine how difficult it is for your receptionists to transfer a prospective client to a lawyer who has expertise in a specific narrow area of law? Ideally, a keyword search on your website will result in a lawyer’s name by way of a publication authored or association with a practice group.

How hard do you want your site to work for you? A small firm might be justified in only using their website to house their contact information, professional bios, services descriptions and a student recruitment section. You may not have the resources to keep feeding this beast, so you keep it simple, but functional.

Mid- and large-sized firms have the advantage of more lawyers available to contribute to their sites, thereby improving their site’s keyword rankings with more regular fresh content. Frequency of content updating attracts search engines to re-index your site and often returns with higher rankings for your site.

This is one of the reasons for the explosion of blogs in recent years. Bloggers write a running commentary in a journalistic-style that’s usually quite personal and engaging. Many lawyers have blogs to discuss their practices and client-industry news. But, there’s much debate on how firms should handle (or control) lawyers who blog.

Readers can post their own comments, providing healthy and informative debate. Sometimes though, content can become controversial. Imagine one of your lawyers, a forestry blogger, amid a heated industry strike. He or she makes an offhand, but contentious, remark and now the media have picked up the story and your firm’s name is attached. The media exposure could be great or disastrous for your forestry practice depending on the remark and your clients’ position on the matter.

If your firm can overcome the fear of handing one or more of your lawyers with a virtual bullhorn, and you’re prepared to duck should an unsavoury or controversial remark go airborne, you’re likely to gain valuable profile.

Getting down to basics, though, you want your website to meet the needs of a select group or groups of users. And you want it to rank high on keyword searches, giving your firm profile by driving traffic to your site. Another desirable quality is site-stickiness where users make repeat visits.

So how do you know if you need to pull the pin on your current site? If your site is meeting the expectations of visitors and your lawyers are still pointing the way to the site, it could still have some life left. But, if it’s no longer effective in attracting regular visits by clients and prospects and your lawyers are reluctant to contribute content, it’s time for a critical review.

Elements of a Successful Website

If it’s one of your firm’s major pain points, it’s time to stop the train and have a closer look. The elements of a successful website are:

one champion who is responsible for its well-being
quality of content (currency, relevancy, readability)
frequency of content updating
quantity of content
ease of navigation
clean design with clear and consistent visual cues throughout the site
a look and feel that’s consistent with your firm’s brand

Ask a variety of people (lawyers, staff, external individuals) to measure your site against the last six elements—you could even rate each numerically to provide a quantifiable score card.

Depending on your results, you could be facing a complete overhaul, propping up what you currently have online, or just a little polishing.

No, You Can’t Do It Yourself

This is a job for a pro. It is not a job for a partner, your neighbor/cousin/friend’s friend/almost graduating acquaintance unless they can compete with the best your budget can withstand.

Before you decide on your graphic designer, website architect or marketing professional, some homework will go a long way. Include your in-house marketing and IT professionals at the very beginning.

Here we’ll identify a valuable baseline for devising a strategic vision as well as practical steps for your firm’s website.

Find Out What You Need

Here you’ll want to create a strong and clear vision for the website’s purpose, goals, design and brand. This will form the basis for the detailed design phase, and also be used to gain buy-in from the firm as a whole, but with an emphasis on management and key stakeholders.

Jot down what you need your site to do for you. What’s causing the most pain? What are the common comments about your site? Who is your main target audience and your second largest user-group? What are these two groups looking for? What are your key messages for each group? What platform is your current site on and how long does it take to update content?

Gather feedback from as many people inside and outside your firm as possible. Research other law firm and professional services firms and note the features of interest.

Flash technology— most often used to display animated content—was the rage a few years ago, but many firms are avoiding Flash now as much of its use was gratuitous and distracting to users. Also, content embedded in Flash can not be indexed by search engines, nor can it be reliably reported in website traffic reports.

Consider the standard Flash website. The content and appearance of the site may be excellent, but here’s what you likely can't do on this site:

use the browser back button
highlight contact information to paste into your contact manger, such as Outlook
increase the font size to make the text more readable
bookmark a page within the site
get an accurate search result on Google or search engines

Now, take the standard brochure website, which mimics or replaces a hard copy brochure and is likely to be static with limited or no ability to interact with users. This type of site is not as effective as an interactive site, which is by far the most successful from a business development perspective, but also the most costly to develop and resource for the long term. Brochure sites are passive in design and are contrary to the heart of legal marketing: relationship building.

Sites that are driven by a database of content are ideal in that updating is relatively fast. Populating a new database, or even moving content from one database to another, could consume a significant portion of your resources. Ultimately, the benefits of this effort will outweigh the resources required to get you there. Since content will be housed and pulled from one location, content management will be much easier, updates will be faster and you will have one repository for your marketing content.

Getting Started

Here are some steps to get you started:

1. Choose your team. With any luck you have strong marketing (and IT) professionals in your firm who can lead this effort, given the time to do so. This is not a project anyone can run off the side of their desk. It will practically eclipse all other work until the site is up and running.

In the absence of internal resources, a marketing consultant with project management skills can assist you. As for web designers, programmers and architects, there are plenty to choose from. A firm that understands the legal industry is a safer bet; even better if they have good references from other professional services clients. Visit their recently developed websites and speak to their clients in detail about how the project was run. Was it on schedule and budget? Was there good communication throughout the process? How responsive were all members of the web development company? Were their estimates of time and costs on target? Your due diligence will uncover the best fit for your firm.

2. How wide is the gap? Where is your site now and how far does it need to go to meet your needs? What platform is it on and does it need upgrading? Can a non-technical person make simple text changes to the site now? Are changes done internally or externally – what are the costs?

This forms the framework for your project plan and will help determine the site’s objectives and look and feel. If your site is starting to feel old and lawyers are no longer keen to contribute content or they aren’t directing clients/prospects to the site, it’s likely you’re ready for an upgrade.

3. Take a closer look. Establish a consultative group of partners and/or other stakeholders identify the project owners. This consultative group can serve as a very effective sounding board and help to disseminate key messages throughout your firm.

Buy-in of key internal stakeholders will benefit your site in the long run – they’ll deal with nay-sayers, provide critical feedback and once you launch, they’ll become champions of the site and will be among the first group of lawyers who will willingly provide content to the site.

They should receive a mandate or terms of reference which clearly sets out their role and anticipated contribution. However, it’s the project owners who ultimately make the final decisions and they do so based on the feedback from this group and perhaps the firm’s executive.

Now dig in. Consider your core message and how detailed the site’s content needs to be. At this point market research (both your internal and external) is important. What are the expectations of your lawyers, clients, prospects and students? Will you balance their needs equally? What can reasonably be achieved given your resources, both human and financial? And, what are competing law firms offering online? Will you lead or follow?

4. Map out your site. At this point, you’ll need a detailed snapshot of the site and how it will operate. This will include:

mapping your site’s information architecture, including how it should function
the look and feel of the site that’s consistent to the firm’s established brand identity
the system in which your content will be housed
the content migration plan
site governance and operational management plan
search engine optimization strategy – how you’ll ensure a variety of relevant keywords on Google, or any other search engine, will result in high rankings for your site.

With your detailed snapshot in hand, draft a project plan. Depending on the scale of your project, a project plan that sets out the objectives, key milestones, timelines, responsible persons, budget, meeting frequency, project update schedule, and identification of stakeholder groups to assist you. Be prepared for timelines to shift mid-project.

From this point on you’ll be consumed with the content migration process where content from your existing site will be copied to your new environment. Once in place, your team will be busy wading through content and fine-tuning how it fits with the new site and architecture.

Measuring the Success of Your New Site

How do you know when you can claim your site is a success? It’s one thing if the lawyers in your firm are happy with it, but quite another if clients, prospects and recruits are using it.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who often host (maintain your site and store all its huge files) websites typically offer website traffic reports as part of their hosting services. Most of these are basic and will indicate the number of unique visitors, where users enter a site, how much time they spent in wandering around and, perhaps, which general geographic region they are viewing from. Of course, your host is ready to sell you an upgraded traffic program and in many cases, this is worth exploring.

Depending on your firm resources, standalone web analytics programs (WebTrends is the industry standard) may also be worth investing in. Or, consider hiring a web analytics consultant who can help you with site benchmarking as well as identifying your key performance indicators and how effectively you’re delivering on them.

The beauty of analytics is that it will reflect the effectiveness of your strategies by evaluating traffic to certain pages of your site.

Here’s what I mean: If one of your goals is to develop a practice in, say, IP with a focus in the video gaming industry, you’ll want to attract and pull in decision-makers in this industry. Your strategy might include a direct mail campaign, a media relations effort and industry presentations.

After each initiative you’ll be able to evaluate how engaging your effort was by the volume of traffic that visited a related web page. The direct mail campaign could invite prospects to a free seminar and direct recipients to register online through your website; your media relations activities could be measured by the number of visitors to a lawyer’s bio or a particular publication you might have referenced in the editorial; or at a presentation, you could invite your audience to download the podcast of the presentation or the PowerPoint file from your website.

Taking it another step further, you’ll want to offer a mechanism for these visitors to interact with your firm. Make it easy to find e-mail addresses and your Contact Us page. In doing so, you are pulling qualified leads into your business development pipeline (see related article: Law Firm Marketing Functions: A Forensic Review).

Conversely, analyzing which web pages your site visitors are most frequently viewing, outside of measuring a specific marketing program, could give you important intelligence to use for business development purposes.

Whether your site needs a little polishing or you’re rolling up your sleeves to create a brand-spanking new site, do some careful planning, get the right people on board and always consider the client or potential recruit when designing your site.