Panelists at this November’s LMA Midwest session in Chicago had a chance to share their experiences redesigning and rebranding their websites. The panel featured the perspectives of a large and small firm, along with the views of two vendors.
The session was moderated by Beth O’Mahoney, Director of Business Development – Chicago, Taft Stettinius & Hollister.
Panelists included:
- Anne Heathcock – Managing Director of Marketing, Winston & Strawn
- Stephanie Miller – Director of Marketing, Much Shelist
- Scott Rubenstein – Director of Client Services, Rubenstein Technology Group
- Tim Thurn – Director of Client Services, Duo Consulting
Getting Started
Before you devote too many resources to building your firm’s new website, it is important to understand the role the website will play. Start by looking at branding.
Consider new technology and design trends outside of the legal industry. Decide what you want to keep from your current website and define clear goals for the new site so that you can determine what success will look like.
Selling to Internal Decision-Makers
While both law firm panelists had the necessary support to move forward with a website redesign, Stephanie Miller found that it helped her to request that the leaders at her firm access the website on their mobile devices and discuss whether they liked it. For Anne Heathcock, managing expectations was a challenge, as her firm’s redesign took two years. She also added that building consensus is important, but including too many people in the decision-making process can be counterproductive.
Timeline
One effective way to hit your website launch date is to timebox a specific date. Also, according to Scott Rubenstein, it’s important to keep in mind that website projects can take six to 12 months in length to roll out, so the newest website is still six months behind in technology. Tim Thurn added that testing your website along the way will leave you with the most successful result.
Building a Responsive Website
It is important to have a responsive website, one that is designed for different devices, from desktop to mobile. Google will rank your website higher when you have a mobile-friendly site. It can also be helpful to start designing your mobile website first to see what key information is important to include in a scaled back version of the site.
Staying Engaged
Review Google analytics to find out where users are dropping off. Periodically, look at every page, and study analytics and traffic. If a page isn’t getting hits, get rid of it or reinvigorate it.
You want viewers to spend time on your website, a goal that can be quantified by analyzing a webpage’s bounce rate. Once you know how people are using your site, e.g., which pages are the most visited, what pages have lower bounce rates, etc., adjust your design and content accordingly to continue to better connect you're your audience.
Another way to continue to retain and grow your audience is to keep your content fresh with news articles, awards and pro-bono work. Video is a great tool. Just make sure if you add videos that they are also accessible on mobile devices.
Social Media
You can leverage web content through social media. Social media can be a major inbound marketing tool for your website. It is best to use interior pages instead of the homepage when sharing links.
Boosting Your Bottom Line
People make a judgment about a firm right away, how we present our firm cannot be minimized. Tim Thurn said, “Consider the website as an employee of the firm.” Your website shares knowledge and acts a branding tool. To leverage the information-sharing and branding attributes of your law firm website, Websites can help tell an attorney’s story and credential them through their speaking, devote space to telling your attorneys’ stories and credential them through their speaking and social media presences.
What’s Next?
What will we see next with law firm websites? It is likely that we’ll see content or site personalization, a concept wherein a website automatically adapts its look and content to the tastes of an individual visitor based on their prior web-browsing history.
About the author: Lindsey Cramer is the Public Relations Manager at Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard P.C.