Is your website destroying your image?

by David Gilroy, sales & marketing director, Concious Solutions

Imagine the scene. One of your existing clients is playing tennis at their club and their opponent starts talking about how they need to update their will. They say that since the children were born they have not done anything about it.
As your client knows that your firm are always looking for more work (as you remind them on a regular basis… you do don’t you?) they mention the name of your firm to them. In fact, the client was so impressed with that new solicitor who handled their last matter, that they even give the prospective client her actual name – let’s call her Emily Ritchie.
Now, as it is one set all, and the third set being the decider, the prospective client isn’t in a position to write down your name and phone number, so they commit it to memory as best they can, hoping they’ll also remember Emily’s name when they get home.
So, the match is over, your client and their opponent have gone their separate ways. Sometime later that evening the prospective client has had dinner and put the children to bed. They sit down in front of their computer, fire up Internet Explorer, go to Google and enter ‘Smiths Solicitors Norwich’ (imagine this being your name and your town).
The nice thing about this, is that our research has shown that for most firms the combination of your name, the word ‘solicitors’ and your town, will result in your website being top of the search results 90 per cent of the time. All great so far.
However, what comes next is the crux of this article. Fingers crossed, your website is one of the 90 per cent I mentioned above and your site is number one on Google. The client clicks on the link and lands on your website, which is where it all starts to go wrong for so many firms.
Remember, this prospective client has never heard of you before. They have never been exposed to your skills and personality, the smartness of your office, the professionalism of your front of house staff, and all the other things that your existing clients love about you.
What are their first impressions going to be as a result of viewing your homepage?

Common mistakes
I make no apology for the directness of the following comments. They will not apply to everyone, particularly if you have redesigned you website in the past 12 to 18 months. But, they are all culled from our experience of working with clients, and have all been seen on law firms’ websites in the past three years.
Screenshots that were live on the web at the time of writing include:

Out of date logos – as the client’s first exposure to your brand they are not going to know that it’s out of date, but they will realise as soon as they arrive in your office, assuming they get that far. I find it hard to believe that firms change their branding, headed paper and signage, yet still do nothing about their website. It is becoming increasingly uncommon, but it still occurs;

Old fashioned logos – c’mon, you know what I’m talking about. Script type fonts with one or more letters (for example, the S, J and S of Smith Jones & Smith interlaced in some intricate way). Something that looks more in keeping with the Bible than a modern, forward thinking law firm’s website;

Out of date content – this is probably one of the most common sins that many firms regularly commit. A new site is developed, all the old newsletters are loaded up, a few current articles are added, and then what? The site just stagnates again. If your firm has no dedicated marketing resource, and by dedicated I don’t mean full time, then keeping your site bang up to date with legal news is hard to do. So what most firms do is have no ‘time sensitive’ content on their website at all. OK, this means that the content cannot be out of date, but it also means that you are missing a trick. By having up to date, well written, timely content on your site you have the chance to really impress the prospective client that lands on it. The trite expression ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’ is as true as it has ever been in this context. Nobody wants to see a page that is titled ‘Latest News’ and find that there’s nothing with a date less than six-months old;

Pages under construction – this is something else that we still see going on all too often. Take, for example, Figure three. This is a screenshot from a real website, but not enough that you can identify who it is. A prospective client landing on a website where this is a link to a page called ‘Rates’ would be pretty sure to click on it. If this is what they found, what sort of impression do you think it makes;

Out of date footers or copyright statements – this is one of the easiest mistakes not to make. It takes just a few minutes to have your web designer update any copyright or ‘last updated’ dates at the footer of your website;

Missing persons – no, not something to do with the police or ‘Crimewatch’, but the act of not having all your staff listed on your website. In the example used above, it was the new solicitor Emily Ritchie that the client referred their tennis partner to. So, imagine what happens when the prospective client clicks on the link from the homepage to ‘Our Team’ and finds…

Just a list of partners – so they begin to think that maybe the firm does not value the rest of the staff;
No people at all listed – just some fluffy text about how great your people are, and how much you value them… so much that you cannot even be bothered to list them, or have a photograph taken;
Have everyone listed – but, they cannot see Emily Ritchie. So, then they start to question whether they remembered the name correctly and there’s a risk of paralysis setting in, ie. they are too embarrassed to contact the firm as they do not know who they should be asking for.

All of the points above have a direct impact on the impression and image that your firm portrays to prospective clients. It’s absolutely vital that your website is clean, modern and fresh in its design. It must either have no time-sensitive content on it, or, much more preferable, is some bang up-to-date content.
The example of ‘page under construction’ is taken from a website where the firm has taken its old site offline completely and the whole site now has that big red triangle on it.
The days of ‘…not worrying too much as no-one looks at our site’ are long gone. Prospective clients are increasingly using search engines and the web far more when selecting a solicitor to work with.