“Website, website on my screen, who is the best lawyer you’ve seen?”
If you look at enough law firm websites, you start to realize that many lawyers are having their sites designed and developed for themselves. Which is fine, if the site is to serve as an online shrine of narcissism.
They include laundry lists of awards and memberships. Some contain practice area pages that read like legal treatises.
These sites reek of self-love.
You can easily picture these lawyers commandeering the design and development process from their web design team.
Then there are the law firm sites that reflect what lawyers believe their prospective clients want.
Hey, at least they’re trying.
Unfortunately, they’ve never bothered to ask their prospective clients what they actually want. They haven’t done any research. They don’t provide a means for visitors to provide feedback, ask questions or complain.
They simply don’t supply the information that their potential clients are looking for.
These lawyers “just know” what their audience of potential clients wants.
Of course, the problem is that the intended purpose of many law firm websites is to help the lawyers earn new business.
Which means your law firm website should be designed and developed for the people who will send you new business and those who will become new clients.
These people include:
- Former clients.
- Current clients.
- Other lawyers.
- Friends.
- Family.
- Other professional service providers.
- Staff & Employees.
Just to name a few.
Depending on the nature of your practice, these might also be people you don’t yet know.
These might be people who are:
- Looking for information related to legal issues.
- Looking for information related to financial issues.
- Looking for information related to medical issues.
- Looking for information related to their arrests.
Just to name a few.
How does your website resonate with these people? Have you asked? Have you provided a means through which they can provide you with feedback?
Are they subscribing?
Are they liking?
Are they sharing?
Are they commenting?
Are they downloading?
Are they signing-up?
Are they emailing?
Are they calling?
If not, it might be that your law firm website, blog or other online communication device isn’t working effectively.
And one of the reasons it might not be working is because it wasn’t built for them. It was built for you.
I deleted all social sharing from our website just to go against the flow of social hype. People really don’t “like” “+1” or “tweet” nonsense content pages. Blog posts, that’s another topic.
If you’re talking about static page content that doesn’t motivate visitors to share, then I completely agree. However, you might ask yourself what the purpose of those static pages is. Perhaps the solution isn’t necessarily removing social engagement features, but updating content to make those pages more social. Just a thought. Obviously that’s not appropriate for all page types.