Website navigation encompasses all webpage elements which allow your users to move easily around your site. In today’s busy world, the easier a website is to use the more likely your potential clients are to stay and read your content—and to return. In short, the success of your legal website can actually hinge on the navigation, and many experts feel it is even more important than a great design or exemplary content. If your user is unable to find what they want on your site, then even if what you have to offer is absolutely fabulous, they won’t be able to easily find it and will head to a more user-friendly site. Navigation on your legal webpages should be simple, clear and intuitive to be effective. Further, any time you update your pages, you must also update your navigational tools to reflect those changes. Let’s look at the elements of navigation in order to more fully understand just what great navigation is.

 Mapping Your Navigational Tools

Start with a large piece of paper to put together your legal website’s navigation. For legal firms it is likely you will simply have free content rather than a private membership area, so make a large box at the top of your paper labeled “public home page.”  You will then draw lines to every page your home page is meant to link to with another box at the end of each line. You will be using this exercise to determine your level one pages such as your home page, the level two pages which are the pages linking form your home page, and level three pages which link form your level two pages or other category pages. Once you have a rough model of your sitemap, sketch out your home page with all the links you want to appear within your webpages. The most important thing to remember when you are outlining your site is that over three-quarters of the people who land on your site will arrive at a page other than your home page. Your visitors must immediately feel comfortable no matter where they arrive within your site, and must be able to quickly find their way around to the area they most need.

Menus Contribution to Navigation

The most critical element of your navigational tools are the menus. Your main menu should either run across the top of your page or down the left-hand column and many websites also add a navigation bar at the page bottom.  Your menus and links need to look exactly the same on each and every page within your legal website and must be visually presented in a way which allows your potential clients to have no trouble identifying the most important links.

Other Navigational Tools

Images which contain links, links with your content, floating menus and the use of individual buttons all contribute to your site’s ease of navigation. The individual buttons will be those with words such as “back,” “details,” “previous,” etc. Other elements which will contribute to great navigation will be an “About Us” area which will give an overview of your firm as well as a short bio of each attorney. Your contact form will be short, simple and will inspire trust in your web user, asking for just the right amount of information. Depending on your specialization you will detail your services, having an easy-to-find and use link to each different area. A privacy policy is always a good idea in order to reassure your users you will not use their personal information in any way except to contact them about their current issue or problem. Many legal websites now have a blog which gives your users high-quality, useful information about specific legal problems. You may also add testimonials from existing clients or news items, including press releases.

Among legal websites, perhaps even more than other types of webpages, a strong call to action can be one of the most important elements of successful lead generation. Because of this, a call to action should be used in every single marketing tactic you employ. If you want to ensure your firm’s website is having the desired results, ask yourself what call to action you are implementing in order to drive user’s behavior. Hopefully your web pages are full of great content, exemplary headlines, prime keywords, excellent design and the kind of easy-to-use navigation which makes your users happy. Even if your pages implement all these elements, without a strong call to action your users will be unable to get to the final “goal.” In other words, you need to ensure you have let your users clearly know what you want them to do.

 Laying the Groundwork

Before your user can be convinced to complete a call to action they must fully recognize the need. In other words, a problem must have been presented, and the call to action link will presumably solve that problem. Depending on your firm’s specializations and goals, you may have more than one action you want your visitor’s to take. You may want them to request a free consultation, sign up for your newsletters through e-mail and download a particularly informative whitepaper. If this is the case, prioritize your action calls, and give the most important one both a bigger size and more prominent placement. Further distinguish between your action calls by varying the color.  Don’t, however, allow yourself to diminish the importance of the call to action by having too many of them—when people are presented too many choices they tend to leave without choosing any of them.

Design of the Call to Action

Strong calls to action should be located below the contact form and should integrate a strongly-colored link or button to ensure they are easily identifiable. As far as the exact color goes, while some marketers believe a red call to action will significantly increase click-through rates, others believe the color should be determined by your context. In other words, although the color should contrast to the colors around it in order to make it stand out, you nonetheless want it to fit in with the overall color scheme and design of your site. Although the link or button should be large enough to spot easily, you shouldn’t determine the size independently of other factors since it is related to the context on your web pages.

Allow some white space around your call to action in order to avoid it appearing overcrowded and ultimately to attract more attention.  The most effective placement for your call to action link will depend on what surrounds it, so test various positions to ensure you’ve located the sweet spot.  An unconventional shape can attract your reader’s attention plus you may want to avoid the more traditional square corners lest your visitors view your call to action as an ad or banner and avoid it. Experiment with out of the ordinary shapes for your site’s call to action.  Some of the best calls to action will give the visitor a sense of direction through an arrow which points to them and while graphics are important, generally speaking those who are looking for information are searching for text.

Language

You need to use specific language when designing your call to action. Active words such as “call,” “register,” “subscribe,” “click here,” “free whitepaper,” “order now,” “sign up today,” “free download” and “more info here,” all work well in calls to action.  Once you realize how important your call to action really is, you will begin to put the necessary thought into it. 

While dark website layouts can be quite effective, they should be used with caution, particularly among legal firms. For a law firm—or really for any business—before deciding on a dark website design there are a few considerations. First you will want to have a total understanding of exactly who your ideal user is and what they are looking for when they arrive at your website. You will want to know your targeted user’s age and social level in order to determine what type of website will be most likely to attract them. While knowing your average user’s age may seem like a non-essential piece of information, remember that those users above 50, as a group, tend to prefer lighter backgrounds—not only because they are easier to see, but also because they are likely more used to visiting websites with light backgrounds therefore it feels more familiar to them.

 Although some website designers disagree with the theory that dark backgrounds make the text more difficult to read, most users at least have a perception that it is more difficult to read and may not even stick around to find out. Of course readability is also affected by jarring text color, font size, typography and other elements. Should you decide to go with a dark website, all the elements which go into making up your site must work well together to avoid an unnerving experience for your potential clients.  In other words it is possible to have an effective legal website based on dark web design, but you run the risk of sending people bouncing off your site before they’ve even had a chance to see what your site is all about. So, should you decide you want a dark website design, there are certain things to keep in mind.

 Implement More White Space, Avoid Clutter and Watch Your Typography

When you’ve chosen a dark web design you must ensure there is plenty of white space surrounding each element or you risk having the site look cluttered since dark layouts give the feeling that the elements are closer to one another than they actually are. Readability is also increased when white space is added. Dark backgrounds must work hard to avoid a cluttered look, so if your site has a fair amount of copy, you will want to separate it through the use of sections or subpages. While typography is always important, it is even more so when using a dark background. Increase the size of your fonts and line-height, and use short paragraphs. Avoid any serif fonts because they tend to be less clean and clear, making readability more difficult.

Contrast and Content

Using pure white to contrast with your dark background can be unpleasant for the user—think about how it feels to wake up, walk to your blinds to draw them back and be hit with the brightest sunlight. It is a jarring experience and you don’t want to replicate that experience for your users. Use complementing colors to scale back the contrast of your site and you may be able to make a dark background work well for your firm’s website. A key advantage to using dark backgrounds is that you can emphasize text and image elements in more creative ways than you can with a lighter background. Deciding on a dark background means you must ensure the focus remains on the content rather than on the background itself so the site doesn’t feel “heavy.”

 Making the Decision

Dark website design can be authoritative, strong and elegant when used in an appropriate manner however you will likely want to consult with a very experienced web designer prior to deciding to use a dark design. Dark designs tend to elicit a stronger emotional response which makes them great for creative sites, perhaps not so great for the legal field, so proceed with care should you decide on a dark web design.

Any time you display information on a webpage, the actual content and presentation are tied together; the information is tied to the visual design and the reader must be able to access the information then interpret it. The ultimate goal of the web is to make the content accessible to every user. Web content is neither tied to a specific operating system, software or even a computer—web content can be accessed on a wide variety of devices even some kitchen appliances can read web documents. The content can be displayed in a dizzying array of sizes, colors and fonts, limited only by the reader’s imagination. The goal of achieving device independence as well as access for all therefore must lie in the separation of presentation and content.

 For those who are unclear about what exactly constitutes content and presentation, content refers to the information in your web pages as well as how that information is structured. Structure may appear to be somewhere floating between content and presentation however presentation would be meaningless without structure therefore the structural elements belong more clearly to the content side. Presentation encompasses all the ways the content—and the structure of the content—is presented. Anything which controls how the content appears rather than what it actually says is presentation.  The separation of content and presentation may seem like a foreign concept since most of us are accustomed to making the visual choices related to content such as headings, paragraphs, lists, etc.

The Benefits of Separation

By separating the content from the presentation on your website you will ensure your web pages are more widely accessible to your potential clients. In practical terms, however, it can be extremely difficult to maintain the distinction between presentation and content since often we are unable to see the difference between what is being communicated and how it is being communicated. When you realize that even the most poorly formatted document nonetheless has a presentation in the form of layout, fonts, etc., you understand the difficulty in the clear separation.

How to Achieve Separation

The first step in the overall idea of separation is to build structure into web documents through the use of HTML which encodes headings, paragraphs and lists. The document which results from this step is richer in meaning and can be accessed by any web-enabled device in the necessary format. Think of your overall intentions when attempting to separate content from presentation—what is your content goal for your web users, and what do you think potential clients intend to do with that content? Do you think it is what they are searching for, what they need to answer their most pressing questions and problems?

To begin separation, start with plain text—that is, text which is placed in a notepad on Windows. Then use HTML tags which clearly mesh with the meaning of the content. Remember, HTML tags should describe the text placed inside rather than be placed simply to achieve a desired “look.” Double-check to ensure you are not accidentally placing presentation markup when new content is created and learn all the styles available to you. Take a look at your finished product—it should be simple, crisp and clear and you should know exactly what each HTML tag is being used for.

In the end, the separation of presentation and content can stop a simple design tweak from becoming a full-fledged re-design. Isolating content ensures adding and updating will be as simple as possible while design consistency is maintained throughout your sight. While the separation of content and presentation can make you want to throw up your hands in despair—don’t. There is plenty of high-quality help available to make the process as simple as possible.