Perhaps you feel your legal website is just kind of…sitting there. While it is not necessarily a failure, it simply appears to be languishing in cyberspace so you think a total redesign is in order. Before you jump in to tear apart a lackluster design, think about the fact that a major overhaul can be a dangerous—and less than productive—strategy. Generally speaking, people don’t like change and it takes a while for them to adapt to a new environment. The better strategy could be to make it a point to engage in continuous improvement of the tasks your customer’s engage in the most on your site. Many site owners seem to have an obsession with website redesign, and while some of them can result in a better site, many times the redesign is simply done for the wrong reasons.

 Design Only When There is a Valid Reason

If there is a genuine reason for a major overhaul such as the fact that the old structure simply is not working, then go ahead and redesign—if not, think about it a bit longer and try to sit down and determine what part of the site is not working and why. Most organizations would rather spend $50,000 on a single overhaul project than to spend $5,000 per year to continuously improve their site. While this sounds counter-intuitive, remember that organizations—and the human beings who make up those organizations—love to measure and a single project is much more measurable than a series of improvements. A large redesign probably also comes with a large budget, has a beginning and an end, making it easy to measure results.

Redesign is More Fun!

In other instances, a redesign is chosen over improvements simply because it’s more fun. Let’s face it—constant updating and implementing improvements is pretty much sheer drudgery. All those changes can seem small and trivial and it can feel as though you are simply spinning your wheels. Nonetheless there are valid reasons to choose continuous improvement over total redesign. The world is a huge, complex place and it is virtually impossible to ensure that within one huge design, everything is absolutely perfect. It’s much better to change in small increments, then test the results. Test your headings, test your links, test your images at a larger size vs. a smaller one, test your navigation and test the strength of your content. Prior to the Web it was incredibly difficult to determine how people reacted to content. The Web allows us to observe how our content causes people to behave and to react.

Avoiding an SEO Crisis During a Redesign

Finally, it can be difficult to avoid an SEO disaster during a major website redesign, losing the rankings and organic search traffic you’ve worked so hard to obtain. When you redesign your website there’s a good chance the URL’s will change and if they change you have to let the search engines know where the older URL’s have moved to. If you don’t, your hard-won SEO is going to vanish into thin air, leading to a drop in your PageRank, drops in organic search traffic, drops in readers and a drop in conversions. If you can possibly keep the same URL structure that your original website had, by all means, do so as your life will be much, much easier. Should you decide that a total redesign is absolutely necessary, make sure to review your current optimization before the redesign, making sure the new pages contain the same optimization.  Baby steps are almost always than a big leap into the unknown, so if possible get over your dislike of improvement and give it a whirl before you decide on a large redesign.

The bounce rate for your website is an extremely important number to know since it lets you know how many visitors “bounce” away after landing on your site. In other words, they visit your page, take a quick look and realize it was not what they were looking for, and leave your site to find another which better meets their search query. Any action such as hitting the back button, closing the browser, clicking on an ad on your page, clicking on an external link, or typing a new URL into the browser would result in a “bounce.”

 While many people are currently using a program such as Google Analytics to determine their bounce rate, you can easily figure it out on your own by dividing the number of visitors who left your site after viewing one page by the total number of visits. In other words, if you received 7000 total visits for the month of May, yet 3400 of those left after looking at only one page, then your bounce rate would be 0.48 or 48%. The lower the bounce rate the better, of course, and if you want an exact bounce rate a good web analytics program can automatically tract these numbers for you.

Taking Your Bounce Rate Seriously

Most research agrees that when users arrive on a webpage they decide whether or not they will stay in less than 3 seconds, usually not even scrolling down the page. If they note excessive or intrusive advertising they are gone in an instant. Users will almost immediately assess whether the header and graphics appear professional then will skim the page title and introductory text in order to determine if there is anything of value or just what they can get from the site right this minute. This means that your goal for your website must be to both satisfy and impress your user within mere seconds of their arrival, ensuring your content which resides above the fold is clear, well-presented and compelling. Get to the point of your content right away, show the purpose of your site, and prove that you know your topic. In short, your website’s bounce rate measures the overall quality of the site from your visitor’s point of view.

Reducing Your Bounce Rate

• Design is important because should your visitors find anything other than what they expect to find—or a presentation that is truly awful—they will be gone in a flash. Clean, uncluttered and professional designs are always preferable to flashy sites full of bells and whistles, yet potentially confusing to visitors.
• As always, content is crucial. If your content is not highly focused and relevant to what your users are looking for, then they won’t care why, they will just leave. Focused content means you concentrate on one specific subject at a time, and that it is immediately obvious what that subject is. Great content will naturally lower your bounce rate, so make it a priority. Update your content often, remembering that lots of posts that essentially say nothing are not better than fewer posts that offer interesting, compelling content.
• Take the navigation portion of your site extremely seriously—if your user is unable to immediately determine how to easily navigate your site, they will be off to find a site which does offer simple navigation. Navigation must be simple and must be accessible from every page on your website. The landing page is equally important—it must never be poorly written, unappealing or hard to read.
• In general avoid intrusive ads and pop-ups or anything that sings and dances, distracting your visitor from the content they came for. Discreet ads on side-bars or headers which don’t move or shout at the visitor are acceptable, but all in all, users hate ads. Make sure your pages load quickly—today’s web surfers are an impatient, tremendously busy group.
• Finally, no matter how compelling your headlines are, remember that your content must match the headline and must deliver on any promise made. In other words, if your headline promises to guide the user through the DUI process then the article talks only about how great the DUI attorney is, your visitor will be disappointed, will bounce—and will not return. If you make promises in your headlines, make sure you keep them.

Overall, a high bounce rate tells Google and other search engines that your visitors simply are not finding what they need on your site. Since the goal of search engines is to deliver relevant content to users, you may be penalized for a high bounce rate. In general, anything below 50% is considered an acceptable bounce rate, while numbers higher than that should be immediately addressed.

The presentation of your content may have much more impact on your readers than you realize. Of course the actual words are the most important aspect, but if your content looks visually unappealing, your visitors may leave before they even have a chance to see if your content is high-quality and useful for their needs. In general, skip the fancy fonts and stay with Arial or Times New Roman for content in order to make it easy on the eyes. Don’t go crazy mixing fonts within your content as it can be very distracting to the reader. Of course you should use the tried and true techniques of web writing including headings, bullet points, short sentences within short paragraphs and a considerable amount of white space. Whatever font, font size and font color you choose, make sure to use them consistently throughout a single article.

 Organizing Your Content

Once you’ve made a comprehensive inventory of the content you intend to put on your website, you need to understand what your users will want to see first. Especially if you have a considerable amount of information to deliver, with lots of links, there needs to be a formal method of organization instead of simply placing it willy-nilly throughout your site. You could organize alphabetically or numerically, but these techniques only work well for specific categories of content, and legal content is not really one of those. Organizing by format makes sense if you have a wide variety of different types of content such as tutorials, interviews, blog postings, white papers, etc. In the end you will simply need to sit down and determine which organizational scheme is the most logical for your particular content. So long as it is laid out in a commonsense manner, your web users will be able to quickly find what they are looking for—remember that when visitors have to squander precious time looking for information they are likely to become frustrated and go somewhere else.

Determine Your Content Goals Then Prioritize

Once you’ve determined the hierarchy of importance for your content you can tailor your specific content to meet those goals. If the primary purpose of your website is to provide high-quality information—with a secondary goal of gaining new clients—then your information and navigation must be conspicuously displayed and easy to navigate. Get to the root of what you feel is the most important content for your visitors, then display that content in the most prominent position. You want to ensure that visitors have to engage in the minimal amount of clicks in order to find exactly what they need.

Timeliness

Of course your website and blog should be continuously updated—letting a site or blog languish can truly be the kiss of death and can undo every good thing you’ve accomplished. It’s not enough to get your website going, start a blog, write for a few weeks then go MIA and in fact it can really hurt your business. You will want to update frequently with high-quality, informative content that will offer your readers something of value, keeping them coming back for more. To this end, make sure the date of your last revisions and/or the copyright dates are accurate, and that there is no outdated content anywhere on your site or blog.

Final Tips

To ensure your content is presented in a fresh, engaging manner which consistently grabs the attention of your users, take great pains to make sure there are never typos or grammatical errors, that your content provides useful links to other sites and that you maintain a consistent set of colors for hyperlinks so your visitors can easily tell whether they have visited a page or not. While content is king, content presentation can make or break your website.

Many law firms remain skeptical about the advantages of social media until a line can be drawn directly from the use of social media to an increase in conversions—or an influx of new clients. What is sometimes more difficult to see is how social media return on investment can transcend gaining new clients in its ability to strengthen relationships with prospective clients, partners, existing clients and even competitors. There is a huge interest in social media return on investment, with webinars and conferences devoted to the subject. When you go about calculating your ROI, you will naturally want to factor in the cost of the necessary resources needed to maintain your social media presence. From that point you will attempt to calculate your relative return on sales from your social media investment.

 What you may not be factoring in are other objectives such as brand engagement or customer behaviors. The social media you engage in with your potential clients allows your firm not only to increase visibility, but to get immediate feedback. Social media may also be the simplest manner of communication you currently have at your disposal. In other words, if you want to know what clients and potential clients think about your firm, social media is the best tool in your arsenal to get those answers quickly.  So if your ROI is not always directly tied to your forays into social media, what is the purpose, you may ask?

Well, first of all, suspend your use of dollars and cents for a moment and measure your ROI on customer investment—namely their time.  Through social media you can quickly find out what topics your prospective clients and current clients care about, and what the most important topics of the day really are. You will also get a good sense of how your reputation and authority on your subject compare to that of your competitors. Social media is controlled by the consumer as opposed to more traditional forms of marketing which are controlled by those who market and their brand. Social media allows potential clients to determine the very best decisions for themselves in their own time at their own convenience.

Forms of Social Media

While you may believe YouTube is just for kids with too much time on their hands, in fact it can be used in a highly constructive manner for law firms. Creating videos which provide education, awareness or brand engagement can bring your users back time after time. You might also consider testimonials from satisfied clients or actual case studies which can help potential clients solve their own problems. LinkedIn and Facebook are also very good social media sites used to enhance your firm’s brand. If you participate in LinkedIn’s Answers and Groups you can either simply answer questions posed by others or you can mediate a specific discussion group in your specialty, lending your expertise in the subject.

Keeping up with your own legal blog can also enhance your brand as well as provide your users with an outstanding post they will want to share with their friends. As you can see, all of the social media you engage in actually does ultimately lead to sales, so why you may not be able to put a concrete number on the ROI you’ve gained from social media, it nonetheless exists. Ensuring your social media presence is effective involves controlling how those who locate you via social media will engage with your brand. One thing to remember, however, is that simply launching your social media campaign is hardly enough.  You must follow your social media closely, as well as responding in a timely manner to comments and questions. While you may not be able to get a solid financial number which you can plug into your overall ROI, it is a sure bet that maintaining a solid social media presence will definitely increase your bottom line.

 The term responsive web design has come about from the huge array of tablets, laptops, iPhones, iPads, desktops, web browsers and operating system that the Internet currently finds its way onto. As fast as the technology changes, it’s a miracle that web designers have managed to keep up and ensure that the Internet you see on a handheld device is virtually the same as what everyone else sees. The overwhelming number of devices can be a problem, however, when attempting to create a site to advertise your services which consistently works well across the board. While web developers and designers may still code different sites to ensure equal functionality, this is beginning to change under the technique of responsive design. Responsive design will likely change the way we code as well as how we interact with the Internet on devices off all shapes and sizes.

 But What IS Responsive Web Design?

As the name implies Web development which takes into consideration the way the device it will appear on will respond is what responsive web design is all about. In other words, you could view content on your laptop, then decide to view it on your handheld device and with the new technology your handheld will be smart enough to present the code in a different way, taking into account the size and resolution of the screen in your hand. Text will be flowed differently, and navigation may be simplified. Images can be hidden or shrunk at the very least, but through all of this the code needs only be written once.

How Responsive Design Can Help the Smaller Firm

If your firm is small to medium-sized, your design and development resources could be in short supply, yet it may not make sense to waste your time and resources to maintain separate mobile and desktop sites. Therefore, responsive design can be a huge boon to the smaller business, giving them the ability to make changes only once and have those changes reflected from one platform to another, reaching a much wider audience. Responsive design ensures that your firm’s mobile presence ceases to be an afterthought becoming a fundamental area of design and development. Google has even grudgingly begun to embrace the theory of responsive design with their Webmaster blog guide. Responsive design is much more than simply scaling down components of your site so it will fit nicely on a smaller platform.

 Technical Features of Responsive Web Design

The primary factors involved in responsive web design as far as technical features include flexible images and media through the use of CSS or resizing, a flexible, grid-based layout, and media queries. For responsive web design to truly work, all three of these factors must be integrated with a goal of adapting to every user’s needs. The fluid, grid-based layout expands with the page and is slowly replacing the page designs with a fixed number of pixels, precisely centered. The fluid grid, once squeezed onto a tiny mobile device automatically resizes the width of all elements in relation to one another.

Even so, a complex, three-column layout will not work well on a small mobile phone. In the case of extreme size changes, the layout should likely be changed altogether through the use of one primary style sheet with flexible widths and floats being defined. Touchscreens must also be considered as they are gaining in popularity. In fact, when engaging in responsive design you should probably assume that handheld devices will have touchscreen functions but don’t forget that laptops and desktops are increasingly being outfitted with touchscreen technology as well. Because there is no cursor, touchscreens are without the ability to display CSS, so you cannot rely on this for link definition. While it probably sounds impossibly technical, responsive web design can truly change the way we read the web, thus the way potential clients you’re your legal website.

You may question just how much space you should allocate to your valuable homepage real estate and it is certainly a valid concern. Research shows that corporate homepages are truly the most valuable space in the Internet world, yet much of this valuable real estate is very inefficiently allocated. The homepage of your firm’s website must immediately give your potential clients the valuable information they need while offering the highest level of navigation for what they will find on your other pages. The purpose of your firm as well as how you can help your potential client solve his or her current problem in the most efficient manner should be readily apparent. Using your log and tagline efficiently are the first things to consider then there should be a warm welcome for your users.

 Why is the Homepage Important?

The homepage is the page which is most indexed by the search engines, and overall sets the entire tone and theme for your firm’s website. Additionally, the homepage serves as an orientation of sorts to your users, letting them know they’ve landed in the right place and that your firm offers exactly what they need at this very moment. Consider your homepage as a sort of “funnel,” which can first welcome your user and let them know they are at the right place, then efficiently direct them to where they need to be next.

Your homepage offers a preview of the services your firm provides, not a comprehensive index. In other words, think of your homepage as a sort of “teaser,” which, while not offering the entire range of your services, does give them a tantalizing taste of your firm. You don’t want to overwhelm your reader by slamming them with information, rather strive to sprinkle your benefits and related keywords throughout the site.

Use Your Links Wisely and Create a Clear Navigation

Remembering the funnel which directs your users deeper into your site depending on their specific needs try linking only your main sections from your homepage then provide further links from the main sections. Presenting your user with a plethora of links on your homepage can send them running to a less overpowering site. When presenting the copy on your homepage, try to imagine you are addressing one single ideal client.

This technique will prevent the generalized untargeted content suffered by so many websites. Take the time to hone the message on your homepage and it’s a sure bet you will reap the benefits through increased conversions. While you want your homepage to be clear and easy to navigate, don’t go too far the other way and make it too minimalistic. This tactic can only frustrate your users whose goal was to get right to the meat of their problem via a specific location. You want to strike a delicate balance between extreme minimalism and a homepage that is so crammed with detail that it simply bewilders your user.

The Perils of a Homepage Which is Overly Busy

If your homepage exhibits a dizzying array of choices and decisions to make by the user, they can mentally block out the sections which appear too much like advertising and will never make it below the fold of your homepage. In the extreme, your visitors may retreat to the navigation bar so they can escape your homepage or will leave the site entirely. Your firm’s homepage must not only be streamlined, it must offer an intuitive prioritization for your users, avoiding crowding.

Final Thoughts on Homepage Real Estate

Try to limit your homepage to a single online page then prioritize your features carefully. If it is possible, offer a brief visual presentation of a specific feature of your firm with a hyperlink which allows visitors to learn more. Group your features logically and let your readers know exactly what to expect and your homepage real estate will become more valuable.