Page 11 - Dallas Vol 6 No 2

For this reason, the user experience is among the most effective of the pillars, but by the time creative decisions are made (based on the two aforementioned pillars) there is no room for a technical infusion of user experience.”
BRANDING
ere was a time (before the in- ternet) that having a brand meant something. It meant that there was an emotion associated with a com- pany name. It meant that there was a level of exclusivity. An upper class of product or service. Well, not no more! ese days, every company has a brand. ey have one before they are even a company. And it’s not just companies – now people can have a “personal brand.” We’re all brand am- bassadors for our personal brands which are sub-brands of our company brands, because better brands breed bigger businesses. Won’t you jump on the brand wagon? I digress.
e point of branding, however, was not lost. It was to “di erentiate,” and it still is. e concept of a brand (more properly, an “Identity”) exists to point out how you di er from your competitors (in only the positive ways of course). e problem for law rms is that they really don’t di er ... much.
So brand “experts” are hired to em- bellish some kind of di erence, and pretend like it has always existed. ey look for images that convey this striking uniqueness – the kitsch- ier the better – and spit in the face of authenticity. e result is usually some arbitrary statement in bold font completely devoid of substance like “Small Firm, Big Results” or “Local Service, Global Experience” or “Mea- suring Success by the Mile” laid next to a photo of a snail with a road com- ing out of its ori ce. I’m not gonna lie – some of these campaigns are pretty clever and memorable.
“you’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything,” – Talking Heads.
In that regard, they hold value, but they would probably work equally well for a large number of rms, and they’re not worth as much when they are implemented at the expense of the other pillars. e good news for law rms that succumbed to the desire for a brand name, despite making the mistake of starting with branding, is that brand specialists o en appreciate good design. So they may have over- paid for the loss of only two pillars.
USER EXPERIENCE
is is where most law rm web- sites fail.
It takes a lot of time and advanced technical skill in JavaScript to build a website that facilitates fast response, simple search and content segmenta- tion – a function by which the user is only presented one pertinent set of content at a time so they can ac- tually FOCUS on it. I know, I know, it’s a foreign concept in this world of endless ADD-inducing social feeds and an abundance of calls to action. But research shows that the bene t of focus is engagement.
If people are browsing a law rm website, they are generally reluctant to engage because they are concerned a certain action may take too much of their precious time, or they may be struck with another dreaded Live Chat invitation. For this reason, the user experience is among the most ef- fective of the pillars, but by the time creative decisions are made (based on the two aforementioned pillars) there is no room for a technical infusion of user experience. And at that point, all of the attorney’s attention to detail has been exhausted anyway, so every- one involved up to this point just pats themselves on the back and they send the designs over to the code monkeys for “implementation.”
And that’s how opportunities are lost.
SEO & CTA
Which brings us to the nal pillar. Since opportunity is at a premium due to the massive amount of compe- tition online, some website builders are true opportunists. Neither adept at the creative nor the technical as-
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pects of the trade, they’ve identi ed an area that requires little more than administrative intelligence and the ability to pronounce technical sound- ing phrases like “Domain Authority,” “Algorithmic Revisions” and “Meta Content” all of which are intended to mask very simple concepts. ese individuals that o en call themselves “SEO Experts” live and die by a canon sprinkled around the internet that are con ated of theoretical and o en out- dated tricks. e self-ful lling proph- ecy of this methodology is that search engines eventually catch on, and up- date their “algorithms” to penalize for them, sending “SEO experts” into a frenzy to repair the damage.
For this reason, and the fact that, despite its simplicity, it is costly to do SEO properly, working with indi- viduals focused on this as their pri- mary pillar generally means entering an endless money pit. But the worst infraction of all is that while a great e ort is made getting people to the website, very little e ort is put into keeping them there.
SEO focused sites are usually tem- plate-based, so they lack any di eren- tiation, and they are littered with calls to action (chat live now!, click here for a free this-or-that!, call us today!) and accolades (we know you paid for those badges). e content on many of these websites are terrible, given that they’re written overseas where English is not a rst language, and the websites are generally poorly man- aged to boot! In many cases, these websites may even do a good job of getting tra c to the website, and can boast great SEO, but they tend to also have very high bounce rates.
So, given these vast di erences in natural or learnable skill, it’s easy to see why almost no law rm has a web- site that stands on all four pillars. And this isn’t likely to change, because all lawyers seem to want to work with a “one stop shop” so that they don’t have to do too much of the work them- selves.
AS FOUNDER OF FIRMWISE, IGOR ILYIN- SKY CROSSES PATHS WITH HUNDREDS OF WEBSITES EACH WEEK. HIS TEAM HAS IDENTIFIED THE DEFICIENCIES THAT THEY TEND TO HAVE BASED ON THE NARROW APPROACH THEIR DESIGNER HAS TAKEN.
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