Tagged with 'websites'

We recently completed a website for Leonard, Street & Deinard which is built on the Drupal content management system (CMS).  At launch the site includes some effective functionality which was enabled largely due to the CMS.  Although Drupal-based sites are propagating rapidly on the Internet, to our knowledge, this site is one of the first enterprise law firm Drupal websites.  BigLaw, it seems has Drupal constipation. In fact, based on our own experience, do-it-the-way-they-did-it-yesterday (because it is safe) law firms continue to build new sites on proprietary content management systems for twice the price and half the functionality that is available to them.

Not surprisingly, the innovation in law websites comes from the entrepreneurial companies – both law firms and the professionals whose clients are law firms. In particular, we recently learned of Simplicity Law, a Littleton, Colorado based law firm with a differentiated set of services focused on small business. Their creative business model is represented by a forward looking site built on Drupal.

Most important for the Simplicity Law site is the effortless content presentation.  For example, a page featuring small business law articles includes a “most popular” list generated by Drupal’s ability to incorporate visitor behavior. Content is “tagged” for organization by the site administrator and access by the site visitor. And, bless their souls, site visitors are invited to add their comments to the articles presented. You can call this Web 2.0. I just think it is a site that initiates the client relationship by inviting engagement. You know, client centric.  BigLaw are you listening? No. I don’t think so.

I was discussing this site with one of my strategic partners in the LiftOff Law consortium, John Hellerman of Hellerman Baretz Communications. I was excited when John told me his firm’s new website was also built on Drupal CMS.  And indeed it was good to note his site features integrated social media and social forwarding capabilities. Additionally, one of my favorite practices Hellerman Baretz embraces is featuring (like, to the home page) recent posts headline from their blog. What I also especially liked was the seamless integration of the blog into the site.  Unlike some BigLaw firms who hold their blogs out at arm’s length (because they might bite? … or smell?) or call them not-so-clever things like “blawgs” (ha, ha, ha, uh, not funny) or simply bury them in a link from an attorney bio, the Hellerman Baretz blog is just another way of presenting content. The blog is prominently accessible through the site’s top level navigation as “Knowledge” Knowledge. How accurate. And useful.

It’s great to see this kind of website execution from professional services firm like Leonard Street & Deinard, Simplicity Law and Hellerman Baretz. We’re not claiming Drupal CMS is the Holy Grail. And we also know some of the things we and others try aren’t as effective as we thought they might be. But at least we try, revise and try again. In doing so we endeavor to share a common plane with our entrepreneurial law firm clients who are also evolving their client services to serve their market.

As I have for eight+ years, my goal is to contribute to the improvement of the effectiveness of law firm websites. And the truth is they have improved immeasurably. But, compared to both the potential as well as the greater business-to-business marketplace, there is a huge gap. Here’s my unabashed assessment.

Law firms, by and large, your websites are stiff. They are also ineffective.  I know this because I work for other non-law businesses and, in comparison, you spend too much and get too much junk in return.  Collectively you spend millions of dollars for some of the most ineffective product found online.  Few lawyers know what an effective website is or how to determine if one is effective. Legal marketers are often at the mercy of their clueless lawyers. But that’s no excuse.  Most have done little to improve their knowledge of internet best practices. Our legal industry recognizes some of the most abominable products and fail to provide leadership in this arena.  And web developers, well, we really have no excuse.  You know better.  Unless you are really just that bad.

I recognize this is quite an indictment. I’ll accept all push-back if you’ll join me to begin to take the Internet seriously.  That is, make your website a strategic part of your business development, recruiting and client relationship management.

Why am I so agitated? And what forms the basis of my sentiment?  I just spent 3 days at the Legal Marketing Association annual conference talking to legal marketers and having them share with me their websites, web strategies and their website challenges.  I encountered frustration, ignorance and indifference.

• There’s the marketing manager of the 500 person international law firm who is responsible for her firm’s website. And this represents about 40% of her job responsibility.  The rest is as a data analyst.  Her CMO pays little attention to the website.  This scenario was common.
• The award winning law firm website whose attorney Facebook pages are more prominent in search than the firm’s attorney bios.  And try to print a bio page or any page on the site for that matter. Ha, ha, ha. No print style design. (Not to mention the scores of sites that cannot be viewed properly in Firefox, mainly because most law firms don’t use Firefox browsers. Talk about being inward focused!)
• The well-publicized failure of Holland and Knight, to name one firm among many others who have failed to protect their trade name on Twitter. Twitter.com/hklaw is now the “source of information, Articles and Complaints involving Holland & Knight Attorneys” and out of the control of the law firm. Yeah, but Twitter has such a funny name, who can take it seriously (tongue positioned firmly in cheek).
• The bulk of law firm websites that have no performance metrics running on their site. And if they do have these metrics, nobody knows what to measure or what to do with those metrics except generate reports for management. Action steps? Forget it. None taken.
• Gross cluelessness about what LinkedIn is or how to respond to an invitation to connect when they receive this invitation from a client.
• Mass ignorance about search engine optimization, what it means, how to achieve it and what to do with the traffic when they get it.

OK, so that’s what I encountered with the websites that are already built, but the next generation will be better, right? No, not right. Let’s look at the law firm website RFP’s we are getting today. First, law firms tell us they want a good looking website.  Now that’s good to know. Because we were thinking of giving them something really ugly.  So thanks for clueing us in. And they even want intuitive navigation. Imagine that! But intuitive navigation to what objective? No conversion objective. It reminds me of the joke about the dead atheist – all dressed up but nowhere to go.

Recently, excellent & respected consultants from Wicker Park Group publicly shared an executive summary of a study they conducted on behalf of web solution provider Hubbard One. And they astounded us with the “discovery” that General Counsel look at law firm websites. (This characterization is from the response from the legal market, not the presentation from Wicker Park or Hubbard One to whom we appreciate all shared information) “Almost 90% of them agreed that a law firm’s website plays a key role in influencing a purchasing decision”. You’ll have to forgive me if this was like asking if the Pope is Catholic or if bears poop in the woods.  I mean, did we really have to ask to know that answer? Unfortunately, I guess we did.

So I’m going to make a prediction and then make a simple request. My prediction is that one day a business to business law firm, not a plaintive firm, will discover that the strategic use of the Internet gives them a galloping advantage over their competition. They will put together a public website together with a presence on third party sites and leveraging social media, content marketing and feedback metrics and assemble a strategic assault on their market that will make them an unassailable force. And in doing so they will demonstrate how a law firm can return value to all their partners and associates.

And here’s my request: Just once I want to get a website RFP from a law firm that says, in essence, that they don’t care if their website looks like yesterday’s garbage and has the navigation of something designed by Rube Goldberg.  All they care about is that the website make a measurable contribution to their business proposition by making the phone ring, bringing people to their events, signing up people for their newsletter and all the other meaningful conversion events that they have developed. There are thousands of law firms out there. I’m just looking for this one. I know you exist. Call me. Please.

This is a non-partisan post. OK, maybe just a tinge of partisanship, but let’s keep it professional.

The Web Marketing Association judges have reviewed and voted for which presidential hopeful has the better website. Senator Obama’s website has won by a landslide. We can dissect this evaluation in a moment, but the real question is, “So what?”

The Internet, which has been changing everything, has been playing an ever-increasing role in election strategy at all levels of government. For the presidential election, both candidates are using the Internet to help their campaigns woo volunteers and campaign contributions. So the implication of who has the better website translates directly into who might be able to build a more effective base of activist supporters and who can use the Internet to shake coins out of prospective contributors’ pockets. Election strategists take note.

During the first week of October 2008, 110 Internet website experts who serve as WebAward judges reviewed both www.johnmccain.com and www.barackobama.com using the same criteria used in the annual WebAwards program (for which Duo clients won 5 awards). The sites were judged side by side on seven criteria of a successful Website.  Here is their evaluation:

Design – Asked “which website has the most pleasing design?” WebAward judges selected the Obama site 4 to 1 over the McCain website. 84.5% of them voted for Senator Obama’s website and 15.5% selected Senator McCain’s website as better looking.

Innovation – Website innovation also went in favor of Barack Obama. By the same margin as design, the vast majority of WebAward judges (82.4%) thought the Obama website seems more innovative, while only 17.6% favored McCain’s.

Content – In terms of having the most appealing content, judges again selected the Obama website over John McCain ‘s website, although by a narrower margin than the first two criteria. 71.6% of the WebAward judges felt barackobama.com has more appealing content for visitors compared to 28.4% for johnmccain.com. WebAward judges also found that the Obama website is more effective for telling the candidate’s story and attracting contributions and voters to its cause (72.2% Obama vs 27.8% McCain).

Ease of use – Senator Obama’s website was seen as easier to use by the WebAward judges than Senator McCain’s. 73.8% selected barackobama.com as easier to use compared to 26.2% of WebAward judges who felt johnmccain.com was easier.

Copywriting – It is obvious that both campaigns have excellent writers on staff. Neither websites have any of the editing issues some large organizations can experience. However, the WebAward judges gave the advantage to the Obama site (70.1% over the McCain site 29.9%).

Interactivity – Interactivity makes a website more than just an online billboard and both candidates were effective in giving visitors to their websites plenty to see and do. Nevertheless, once again the WebAward judges gave the edge regarding interactivity to the Obama website (75.2%) over the McCain website (24.8%).

Technology – Use of technology is evident in both candidates’ websites, however, the clear favorite for the WebAward judges was barackobama.com winning 82.4% of the votes compared to johnmccain.com with only 17.6% of the votes.

According to this AmLaw Daily article, Still Loading: Law Firms lag behind the Rest of Corporate America on the Web, “there are still law firms of substantial size that have relatively poor Web site offerings, surprisingly poor Web sites.”

Yet as Sonny Cohen pointed out in his previous blog post, Award Winning Websites Announced By Web Marketing Association, legal websites that get their web design right are recognized and rewarded.

So what’s the real story here? Are law firms’ web designs lagging or worthy of lauding?

If you’re comparing American law firms to corporate America, apparently you’ll find lag in the area of website usability, interactivity, and innovation in design. But many law firms are going beyond “brochure-like” content towards client-centric and service-oriented site designs.

I appreciated Sonny Cohen’s comments on the AmLaw article, saying “the targeted personas for law firms are clients, prospects, potential lateral transfers and first year lawyers” and basically pointing out to other commenters that matching the needs of the users of the law firm’s website is more important than criticizing it based on their own personally-formed beliefs. Plus you need to tie the design into the firms business objectives – and being bookmarked isn’t a business objective. A persona-based approach to website design makes a lot of sense to me, and metrics for judging the effectiveness are a must.

The AmLaw article ends with a ranking list of the Top 100 AmLaw firms web sites. One note it does give you as a takeaway is that you can’t correlate web site design with revenue per partner. Yet without metrics there’s no way to prove this takeaway one way or another.

I found the AmLaw article informative but the comments were just as important – when analyzing effectiveness of a design or handing out rewards, make sure the criteria for judging the content and design matches that of the users of the site. Nicely done.

Today, the Web Marketing Association announced the winners in its annual design and development competition. Duo congratulates 5 clients who are the recipients of this international website recognition:

• Chicago Public Library – Government Standard of Excellence
• Valorem Law – Legal Standard of Excellence
• Chicago Public Schools Alumni – School Standard of Excellence
• Bracewell Giuliani – Legal Standard of Excellence
• B.C. Ziegler – Financial Services Outstanding Website

The common thread among these projects and our clients is their engagement and active collaboration with us to manage their content so they would realize meaningful business objectives. Our clients put a lot of effort into their projects and, in addition to gaining organizational benefit it is wonderful to see them be publicly recognized for their achievement. Congratulations.

Winning a Web Marketing Association WebAward competition, now in its 12th year, is particularly noteworthy. A panel of international judges applies a 10-point scale to 7 criteria for evaluating websites, recognizing the interplay of multiple factors for determining what works online. These criteria are:

• Design
• Innovation
• Content
• Technology
• Interactivity
• Copywriting
• Ease of use

Additionally, judges offered constructive criticism and emotional context to overcome the limitations of their numeric judging scale. Noting the interaction design of the Ziegler website one judge wrote, “You have done a great job of anticipating your audience.” A tip of the hat was extended to the complex underlying technology of the Chicago Public Library site with, “”This is a strong interactive site. It allows the users to interact with the site provider, allowing them to save time by doing research online…”

Reaffirming what many of us have felt about Chicago Public Schools Alumni website, “”This site is fantastic. Really impressive interactivity. Excellent work!” Our content-rich law firm clients’ sites were singled out as well regarding the rich content of Bracewell Giuliani, “The content is compelling.” and the positioning of Valorem, “”Great copy and distinct style and messaging. Sets it apart from the others without undermining credibility.”