Deft Creative Articles

People in virtual glass houses?

November 12th, 2006

Recently I found myself browsing through a number of solicitors websites as research for a project. It shocked me just how bad the majority of them seemed to be. Completely non-compliant, disregarding all accessibility concerns and many other general bad web design practices were everywhere.

When everyone was making a big deal over the DDA accessibility laws in 2004 (laws which had actually been in place already since 1999), website owners were under the impression that at any time they could receive a letter from the solicitor of a disabled person, wanting to sue their firm for having a bad website. Accessibility is a serious area and will be covered in more detail in a future article.

I mentioned this briefly to a client of mine, and the consensus was that they probably just have too much work on to bother about the website. Which is a shame because they could be benefitting a lot more.

I casually browsed around 25 solicitors websites in my general area, and looked more closely at about 5 of these. Out of these I would say that not one of them had what I would consider to be an effective website, either visually or functionally.

It is clear by the state of these sites that they are not being used as a markteing tool to bring in new business. And perhaps that is not the aim and that is fair enough. No doubt they are publishing their website address on their stationary, so what is the purpose of them having a website? Perhaps to boost credibility? Sadly they seem to be doing the exact opposite.

Using a website solely to boost credibility is a perfectly reasonable mission for your website to take on. If you are looking to hire the services of a solicitor and dont currently have one, then what is it that will set them apart from the rest?

I suspect its simply because they believe everybody should have a website, so they got one. But if they really are too busy to get the website improved, then perhaps the website could be working better for them in reducing some of their workload. I saw no evidence of offering any useful tools or downloads on the sites which would serve a purpose.

A good example

I must admit, I have witnessed an excellent use of a solicitors website recently. When I last moved house, I selected a firm purely on the standard of their website. They also had an excellent feature, which was a progress monitoring system on the purchase of our house. Broken down into about 20 stages of the buying process, each stage gained a tick next to it once that part was complete. All we had to do is log on, and see exactly where we were at.

A simple idea like this has many benefits.

• It shows that the firm cares about their clients to bother to put somethig like this in place.
• It helps them cut down on phone calls. I would undoubtedly have called for updates on progress if I couldn’t log in to find this information.
• It helped us to get prepared for the forthcoming steps in the process, so speeding up the whole process.
• It kept us going back to their site, each time being exposed to their branding, links to their other services etc.
• Although extremely useful it was still a bit of a novelty, something I hadn’t come accross before, so I found myself telling people about it, and got positive reactions from those I told.

Having a website isn’t just about bringing in new business, it can be about lowering overheads (such as reducing the amount of phonecalls) or even purely to reinforce your brand or credibility. By thinking about the way your business works, the mundane tasks you perform, questions clients always seem to ask, these things can be handled by your website ans so freeing up some of your time.

Entry Filed under: Web Design Bad Practices