Creating the Home Run Web Site

(Editor's Note: This article is based upon a presentation that the authors recently gave to the Sacramento Lawyer Technology and Law Office Management Users Group (SLUG) that SLUG wishes to share with the readers of this magazine. Ferguson is the president of Ignite Logic, and Finnegan is the president of Nimbus Design.)

In a recent annual survey conducted for Verizon Communications, the Gallup organization discovered that the number of businesses with websites continues to grow at an annual pace of over 10 percent. Since the survey was first conducted in 1998, this growth has remained constant; suggesting that despite an excess of media hype about the "Internet bubble" and its subsequent crash, the value of a website to businesses in the United States continues to grow at a feverish pace.

Why is this? Put simply, the Internet offers benefits to consumers that no other medium can match. Information is generally current (whereas printed sources become outdated almost immediately), information about a product or service can be easily validated with third party sources, and finding relevant information quickly has become significantly easier in recent years with powerful web search tools like Google.

Thus, it is quite likely that if you do not have a website today, you will in the near future. However, if you do have a website today, you may be wondering whether it is as effective as it can be. There are several key factors to consider when planning, deploying and maintaining your website.

Whether you are planning a new website, or looking to improve the effectiveness of your existing one, it is important that you have a strategy for the website that goes beyond merely how the text and images appear on the web pages.

What are the key pieces of an effective site? To make it simple, we will call them the: "who," "what," "how," "where," and "when.":

Who is your site's target audience?

What is the content of the website?

How easy is it to locate your website?

Where will your website be hosted?

When should you update your site?

Who is your site's audience?

Unless you know who your intended audience is, you will not be able to effectively prioritize and organize the site's content. The result will be a site that fails to completely meet the needs of your clients and, therefore, is visited briefly then abandoned. If, on the other hand, you can describe who you are trying to reach and why they would visit your site, you can then orient the entire experience towards meeting their needs.

When designing your site, there are five areas to consider:

Brand Integration - Does the site reflect the goals of the firm?

Design - Is the site organized visually and logically in a way that makes the content clear and easily accessible?

Content - Does the site contain information that is useful to the end user? Is the content dynamic?
Use of Technology - Has the most appropriate technology been employed to showcase the content? How well has dynamic content and animation been used?

Navigation - How many clicks does it take for a user to get to desired information? Can the user quickly and easily navigate through the breadth of the material available?

Revenue Model - How does the Web site generate revenue? How well does it support the firm's marketing efforts? Can the firm measure the impact the site has on its bottom line?

A powerful site will combine the best of these features to create an experience that reflects the firm's vision and values, and also boosts its marketing efforts. The result will be a web presence that mirrors and enhances the existing offline customer relationship. The final design depends on your strategy for engaging your customers and, if successful, raises the performance bar for your firm's competitors.

Now that you know who your audience is, and what the content of your site will consist of, you will need to have a strategy for making your target audience aware of your site, and how it can be reached. Doing this effectively typically requires utilizing a combination of online and traditional marketing methods. The online methods include web addresses, directed links from other sites, search engines and web directories.

Web addresses are directly typed into a browser's address line when a client knows the name of the business they are looking for. If the address is not an obvious derivation of the business' name, the client may encounter an error message claiming that no such address exists or discover an entirely different site than anticipated, and may not make another attempt to find the correct one! Therefore, it is important that your address be easy to remember and easy to spell.

Search engines are most commonly used when someone wants to find information about a topic, but doesn't know who where to begin. People that are searching for websites will usually start at one of major search sites such as Yahoo, Excite, Lycos or Google.

In order to be found, your web site must appear in the first two pages of the search results. The most reliable way is to purchase an ad that appears on the results page when a specific word is searched for. In this model, you usually don't pay for the ad unless a visitor comes to your site by clicking on the ad. The second way is for your site to be highly ranked in the search results. This is the most desirable solution, but it is the most difficult. For example, Google ranks pages by popularity (i.e. how many other web sites refer to your web site and how popular are the referring web sites?) and is virtually impossible to manipulate. Instead, you will have to create a great website that compels others to refer to it.

Web directories provide a categorized indexed to thousands of websites and are often used when a person is looking for a particular product or service from a group of related sites. Registering your website for a web directory is both free and easy; it can be done by finding the desired web directory and clicking on the link to either 'add' or 'suggest' your site to or for the directory. One site in particular, www.dmoz.org, is an open directory that is used by a multitude of other websites, including Google.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, it is important that all of your existing communications materials be updated to include a reference to your website. By placing your web address everywhere that a prospective client, or existing client, is likely to see your firm's name, you are making it easy for your website to be located and utilized.

In order for your site to be available to everyone on the Internet, it must be stored on a server that is connected to the Internet and recognized as a 'website host.' This server could come in the form of a PC in your office that your firm maintains, it could merely take space on a server maintained by a Web site hosting provider, or it could take the form of a dedicated server that is similarly maintained by a website hosting provider. In choosing the solution that is best for you, there a several factors that you must consider: security, reliability, performance, capability and price.
Unless your firm already has a large IT department with a full-time staff, it is best to look to hosting providers to host your website. Basic hosting is quickly becoming a commodity, with many excellent providers offering high-quality service at a very reasonable price. These vendors are in fierce competition for market share, and are constantly looking for ways to add value at a price better than their competitors. When considering vendors, focus on their reputation and, if at all possible, talk with others that have used the vendor. As is the case with most services, a reference from a trusted source is the best source of information.

When should you update your website?

The straightforward answer: continuously. Since a key benefit of using the Internet is to access information that is current, the value of your website to a client will be significantly influenced by how fresh your site remains.

If you keep these factors in mind as you develop and expand your Web site strategy, you will have a website that is a 'home run."