Internet Newsletter for Lawyers |
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1. Speed of loading.
Most ordinary people - potential clients - have ordinary dial-up lines. They will not wait long for a site to load - 5 to 10 seconds is probably the maximum they will wait in normal circumstances. I continue to be amazed how many legal sites take 30 seconds or even longer to load. Flash introductions are one culprit but problems are also caused by large numbers of small elements on the web page or large and beautiful pictures of the senior partner or the office building. Look at your site on someone else's computer and see how long it takes to come up (your own computer is not a good test of this, since your browser has probably already cached some of the main elements of the site and it will come up deceptively quickly).
2. Lack of firm's details.
Quite a few firms site lack either the physical address of the firm, or a phone number, or an email address. People will want to contact you in their own way, and it is essential to have all the possibilities easily available. Having a form for an email response does not count as having an email address - many people are not prepared to fill in a form which demands excessive details about them and/or their organisation - a real email address should be given. Incidentally, quite often the email addresses put on a site are no longer the right ones. Not good.
3. Having to register before being able to see the site.
With junk mail becoming an enormous problem, people are very unwilling to register (which means leaving their email address as well as other details) unless it is absolutely essential. Email addresses gathered in this way would not be particularly useful as a marketing tool, in any case. People who want to return, or to find out more about you, will do so in their own way.
4. Waste of real marketing opportunities.
There are several ways to assist the search engines to find your site which should not be wasted - titles to websites which say "Welcome to XXXX Online", or just "Home Page", make me weep with frustration. The title should contain not only the firm's or chambers' name, but also the location and the special areas of work covered, if appropriate. The metatags for keywords should always be used fully and important words should appear early in the text of the site.
5. Use of visitor "counters".
People are not impressed by how many other people have visited a site (they probably do not believe the figures anyway) and a low visitor count is positively damaging ("this site has been visited 298 times since March 2000"). The counter is also invariably an imported facility from another site, so the first page does not come up fully until the counter site has been accessed. Remove these.
6. Use of imported News Feeds.
There is a school of thought which thinks that potential clients will be impressed with a "news feed" on the site, i.e. a small window which appears on the page offering various current news stories from another site or source. The main problem with this is that the news feed has to be "fetched" from another site, and usually these sites are complicated and slow ones. News feeds do great things for the news source's visitor count, since every time someone accesses your site, they also (without realising it) access the news source site - but it does nothing for you.
7. Creation of your own original material.
This is a very good thing to do - but only if you are genuinely going to keep the material up to date with frequent new additions. Articles and stories from last year or the year before - or even earlier (I am not making this up) do not make you look as if you are up to date yourselves. And even good articles should be removed when they are no longer up to date!
8. Sites which will not "let you out".
Most people surf with frequent use of the Back button and it is very annoying if your site hangs on to them and will not let them go back to where they came from before. Often, this seems to be where there is a redirection on your site, possibly from another web address or a previous site - the redirection works splendidly the first time, but then goes on redirecting the user instantaneously back to the main site when they try to go away. On other occasions, it is a fault of complicated programming on the site. (A tip for the user, here, is that if you put the mouse over the Back button and right click on it, you are offered a list of recent sites visited, and you can select any of these).
Another method of "not letting you out" is when the site opens up a new Window and the only way you can then go "Back" is to close the window. Working out what is happening usually takes a few seconds, which is time wasted - and irritating - to the viewer.
9. Too-clever sites generally.
Many of the latest and most sophisticated sites have serious flaws from the user's point of view, e.g.:
10. Use of terminology which the viewer does not necessarily understand.
Many of the options or sections of solicitors' sites are not at all obvious to an ordinary person, e.g. "private client", "family department", "litigation", "conveyancing", "probate", "full service law firm", "assistant solicitor". These are meaningful terms for the firm concerned but they do not always help the viewer find what they are looking for and if possible, they should be replaced by words which the visitor can easily understand.
PS. Just avoiding these ten sins does not mean that your site is actually interesting - that is something quite different!
email Delia Venables.
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