For a lot of firms, a website project is something they devote more time and resources to than any other marketing project. Therefore, you want to make sure you understand all of the nuances of developing a website that meets the specific needs of your firm.

Our April Ask Me Anything episode dives into everything you want to know about website design and development. Taryn Elliott, Director of Client Success + Marketing, and Keith White, Chief Development Specialist, answer your questions on this topic.

Taryn:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to April’s installment of LISI’s Ask Me Anything. And this month, we are diving into your questions on website design and development. I am Taryn Elliott, the Director of Client Success + Marketing at LISI. And I am joined today by Keith White, our Chief Development Specialist and the genius behind the development of all of our websites. I am happy to have Keith with us today. It is a big day in the Keith household, as he is getting ready for baseball opening day for his beloved Phillies.

Keith:

Very excited to be here. So Phillies opening day. My lovely wife’s birthday today and my debut on AMA.

Taryn:

Wow, all kinds of things. Happy birthday to your wife if she’s watching. If not, we will send her a clip of this video. Let her know that you were thinking of her and is she excited to be sharing her birthday with the Phillies opening day?

Keith:

I don’t know about that.

Taryn:

Does she share your love for Phillies baseball?

Keith:

Over the years, she has gotten to share that love. That’s for sure.

Taryn:

Everyone would always, so I am from the Midwest and I grew up in Cincinnati, so I was a Reds fan. And I married someone who grew up a Cubs fan. And everyone would always ask me if I was a Cubs fan. And this is well before they got good and won the world series and all of those things. They were still terrible. And so people would be like, “Are you a Cubs fan?” And I would always tell people that I was a Cubs fan because it was good for my marriage for me to be a Cubs fan.

Keith:

Big expectations for the Phillies this year.

Taryn:

Well, that’s exciting. Well, I will be rooting for the Phillies because I live in Indianapolis and we don’t have a professional team. My loyalties can kinda go wherever. I’m still a Reds fan at heart. I will always be a Reds fan. I’m still a Cubs fan, ’cause it’s still good for my marriage for me to be a Cubs fan.

Keith:

And we’re working on the Eagles fan. So we’re good.

Taryn:

I do not think you are gonna convinced me to be an Eagles fan. Especially after the whole Carson Wentz thing. So we’re ready to start over as a Colts fan. And I made my loyalties to the Colts. I think I’m established. My brother still hasn’t forgiven me for giving up on the Bengals and becoming a Colts fan, but the Bengals just made it so easy. I don’t actively root against the Eagles or the Bengals or even the Patriots, which is where Kristyn is loyal to but.

But all right, well let’s dive into our questions. We had questions submitted in advance, but if you have questions for us, please drop them in the comments and we will do our best to get to them. And I apologize if you can hear my dog over here, whining and looking at me like, oh, now is a good time for me to make noise. So I apologize.

Okay, our first question that we got that I want to address is that we talk about website design and website development, but I don’t know that people really understand the difference. And I think a lot of people think it is the same thing. So the question is, if we use those terms interchangeably, what actually is the difference between website design and website development? And Keith, I will let you kick off our answer there.

Keith:

Sure. So website design and development, like you said, it’s globally lumped together as one thing. And it’s generally the global project. But design and development are two separate phases of that project. So the design phase is where the page layouts, the UX, user experience, is thought out, your content strategy and everything that goes into the page, all that stuff, and all the pretty pictures come together. The development is really where all the functionality is built out. So you have two parts of the development. You have the back end and you have the front end. The back end is where the content management system, CMS is customized. And that’s where things get together for your custom post types, your custom fields, things that get thought out in the discovery and the design phase in terms of, does a bio have a bar or court admissions? Is there gonna be a professional membership section? Will it be associated links of practices or news items on a bio? All that stuff gets thought out and is in the design phase, but it’s built out in the back-end development phase. And then the front end is where all the pieces come together. So you take your custom functionality, such as accordion menus, sliders, parallax scrolling, you build out all that. And the design is really converted from graphics to code. And then you tie in the back-end development and feed all the content from the CMS to the site. So really, website design and development is overall the project. You have your design and development are really the two processes of that project.

Taryn:

So when someone talks about redoing a website, what they’re truly talking about is generally both the design and the development part of it. Sometimes, people do just want one or the other done. But that does kind of get me to the next question that was submitted. And it is, “What services are generally provided when building a website?” And we’ve talked about the design and the development, but there’s a lot more that goes into a website than that.

Keith:

Right. And so general scope of a website design development project. You think of your design for desktop and mobile. You think of the backend and front end development, which we just talked about. You have your content migration, your content entry, and all the QA of that project. And then, whether it’s pre-launch or post-launch, you have the training on the content management system. And then things to think about in terms of hosting and website security is something that should really be recommended and strongly thought out before the project even gets started. General process of a project. You have your discovery, goes into design, your content entry, your QA, quality assurance, and then launch. And some of the additional services that really should be thought about during that project. Branding, logo design, writing or editing content, ongoing website maintenance, search engine optimization, and marketing. And then you can also start thinking about marketing collateral, whether it be letterheads, business cards, social media graphics, or advertisements. Additional services could be ADA compliance, ongoing SEO, search engine optimization, as well as photography. So there are a lot of services that can go into the overall project scheme of things.

Taryn:

Yeah, I mean, I think we find a lot of time that websites are such a big part of a marketing strategy for a law firm or a professional services firm. That’s also really a time that people say, well, if this is us putting our best foot forward, let’s take a step back and make sure that our logo is what we want it to be and the colors we’re using are aligned with who we are as a firm. And all of those little pieces, because no one wants to make the time and money investment in doing a website only to decide that they hate their logo the following year. And then, sometimes it’s as easy as going back and just putting a new logo in there, but updating all the colors. And if you get into a really in-depth design, like our designer’s really good about taking parts of your logo and kinda weaving it into the overall design of the website. And that’s really hard to do once everything is built. Possible, but then you’re paying twice as much for something that you could have just done the first time. When you talk about the website process, you said discovery, can you define what is happening in the discovery part of the process?

Keith:

Sure. So discovery is really centered around taking a look at the firm’s current website. Getting a better idea of what the firm wants that might be different or in addition to the current website. And really just talking with them and having them answer a bunch of survey questions. It helps us guide the project from the very beginning. So we’re trying to figure out content strategy, we’re trying to figure out outlines of the site structure. So your outline, your navigation. Is there anything specifically, search engine optimization that we need to be looking at? So there’s a lot of stuff that goes into that discovery that sets the stage for the design to start.

Taryn:

Yeah. I don’t necessarily know that people consider that when they’re thinking about the entire process and I’m sure there are some agencies that don’t really do a discovery step and it’s kinda like, here’s our website and we will plug your things in, but then there are a lot of agencies that definitely want that to be their first step. To make sure that when they’re designing a website, they’re designing a website that meets the exact needs of that firm for where they are and where they want to go. But I just wanted to make sure that everyone had that piece for the discovery. I think people know design and development, content load is just taking either all the content from your old site or all the new content that was created depending on how you do that and getting everything ready for the big day at both firms and internally. We always get really excited when we launch a website for our clients. So kinda like putting our babies out into the world. As I’m sure most people feel by the time they launch the website on the in-house side too. It’s definitely a labor of love to get websites to the finish line and really exciting because it is like I said earlier a big investment.

I have a question here that we get asked a lot and that is, “Do you need to interview a firm’s clients in order to produce a website?” Most of the time people ask us this and they’re like, “We don’t wanna bother our clients with this.” We know we have to ask them to do Chambers interviews or we just went through a process where we were interviewing clients about brand or whatever.” And they don’t want to bother their clients again. And the short answer is, no, we do not need to interview your clients. We can do the design without talking to your clients. If we do need information or we’re putting testimonials in, we can usually find another strategy for gathering those. Or maybe we just need to talk to one or two people, but the fear that we need to talk to your clients should not stop anyone from proceeding with a website project. Okay. Let’s see. I have a question here that says, “I have seen several articles on ADA accessible websites. What does that mean?” And I think Keith and I both have experience with this. I’ll jump in and Keith, you can let me know if I miss anything. Not all agencies will talk about an ADA-accessible website. It’s not something that is required to make your website work.

Our agency feels strongly that with a quarter of people having some kind of disability that would prevent them from interacting with the websites the way that we design them, it is just the right thing to do to consider that when designing a website. And we start having conversations about ADA-accessible websites in the design and development phase. So that way, we’re getting off on the right foot. But if you didn’t have those conversations, there’s still a lot that you can do to make your website ADA accessible. And some of the things we talk about when creating an ADA-accessible website is having first and foremost, an easy-to-read font. Some fonts are easier for people to read than others. And so that’s really important to us. And then making sure we have proper contrast between font color and background. Something that you can do at any point in the design anytime you’re creating content is putting periods after abbreviations.

So the example I always give is LMA, which is the Legal Marketing Association should to be L.M.A. because if you’re speaking, you say LMA, but LISI, which is also an abbreviation is pronounced LISI and doesn’t need periods. But that tells the screen reader how to read for any people who might be consuming your website through a screen reader, which is generally visually impaired people. Text linking should be a proper contrasting color and underlying to make it clear like this is a link to something else on the website, and this is how you get there. And something that I think is more on the backend and on the development side is that people don’t always consume your website using a mouse. And looking at it, sometimes people are using a touch screen or a joystick, or even their keyboard to navigate the website. And so in the design and development phase, we make a point of making sure that the menus and the tabs and everything layout. So that way, if somebody’s using a keyboard to navigate the website, it makes sense and they know how to do that. And similar to that, the same with forms. Make sure that they can tab through a form to enter everything. If there’s a button they have to tap it. For people who might need to use their fingers on a touch screen. The button’s not so tiny that they can’t get it. Like, I feel like when I type my fat fingers are always getting in the way. So there are some ways that you can create buttons and forms to make it much easier for people to navigate through.

Keith:

Yeah, there’s a lot that goes into ADA compliance. I mean, so, all the points you tell you brought up, but there’s also using the proper heading tags on a site. So that helps with SEO, but it also helps the screen readers. It helps them be able to break apart content and be able to tell, this heading is gonna be some new content here. This heading over here is gonna bring some extra content. Also, being able to put in text and convert PDF documents, make sure they’re accessible. Same thing with videos. If you’re gonna embed videos on your site, make sure you’re using the captions or even including some text captions underneath the video. So there’s a lot of thought that has to go into ADA compliance. And if it’s something that the firm is very interested in, it should be something brought up in discovery and thought of as the project goes through.

Taryn:

Yeah. And one of the things we always talk about with clients is that it’s not yet legally required to have an ADA-accessible website. And there’s a lot of conversation around what that even means. But there is starting to be some litigation and legislation surrounding what businesses need to do to make their digital footprint accessible to people just like they need to in the physical space. So that’s where it stands today, but we also don’t know what’s going to happen down the road. So preparing now likely will save you some time in the future, aside from it just being a good thing to do. And as Keith said, some of its just good business practice. For instance, a lot of people consume video with the sound off. They’re sitting in a meeting or on a train or whatever it is. And they can’t listen to the video with the sound on. So they’re just reading along. Or they’re reading the transcript underneath, which is also good for SEO, but for a hearing-impaired person in that instance, that also is really helpful. So it’s not just this one thing and that’s the only benefit for a lot of those things. There are a lot of benefits. It’s just a good thing to do.

Switching gears a little bit. I have a question here. “How long does one web development project take to complete from start to finish? Or how long should it take?”

Keith:

Yeah, that’s the million-dollar question. We get that a lot. So, unfortunately, there’s not a pre-set length to how long a website should take. There are so many factors that go into that process. The size of the firm. How much content needs to be migrated over into the new site. Does that content need to be reviewed and rewritten or edited? There’s a lot of stuff that has to go into the thought process and the timeline. In our situation, we can launch a website or we can build a website as quickly or slowly as the client needs. I mean, we’ve launched websites in weeks. We’ve had some websites that will take longer than a year. And it’s just a matter of how much communication and how much willingness are we gonna get from the client to make sure we hit all of the deadlines in terms of reviewing and improving everything.

Taryn:

Well, and I should say our typical project is six to nine months. With six months being if there are no delays and everyone’s responding quickly and efficiently. Nine months is more typical because sometimes, your attorneys go into trial and they’re unavailable for a couple weeks or everything comes due at Spring Break and everybody’s out of the office. So there’s a variety, but typically, we’re launching in six to nine months, depending on all of the other factors that could impact that.

Keith:

Right. And some of the things that we recommend. So the client should appoint a decision-maker or a small committee that’s going to help to make decisions that just keeps things moving in a steady direction. We’re not kind of waiting for that one individual who may have been pulled off into a case that can no longer give it the attention. And then content. I mean, content, content, content. It is the biggest pitfall in all the projects that we do. So, content is one of the strongest things on a website to begin with. It has to be easily readable and understandable by everyone. But it also aids with SEO. So the content needs to be written to kinda factor in both sides of that argument. And then, if you’re thinking about doing a website anytime soon, review your content now. I can’t strongly recommend that enough. You need to get ahead of the game when it comes to content.

Taryn:

Yeah. I know my personal experience with developing websites when I was in-house is definitely the content is the sticking point that we got. And some firms approach content where they wanna write all of their own content. And I understand that. Sometimes they’re like, “I know my practice.” That’s also a service you can outsource. Our agency does a lot of content writing for websites. There are individual practitioners who just do content writing for law firms and websites are one of the things they do. And anyone who does that professionally has a process to get the information out of the individuals they need to in order to keep it moving along. But there are still review processes in that. No law firm wants to let someone write all the content about a practice area and then never review it. So I know that for us when I was in-house, that was definitely where we got slowed down, was content. So my recommendation is A, review it as early as you can. It’s a good time to start deciding if you need to maybe sunset some things that might have outlived their usefulness, but do what you can to keep your content moving forward.” It’s also important that whoever you’re working with that there are regular check-ins. So that way, you’re aware of where everyone stands in the process. Are you just waiting on content or is content being developed but there are other things that need to happen in the website build? Just so everyone’s on the same page and expectations are being met to get everyone to the ultimate timeline or the ultimate goal, which is to release the website.

Keith:

Like I mentioned before, I mean, content is part of the discovery and design phase. So, which is very early on. Content becomes a big portion of that because I mean, you’re looking at content strategy for pages. What content’s gonna go on a homepage, what content’s gonna go on a practice area, what content’s gonna go to a bio. So to be able to have that representative content, to put into the design right from the beginning, it only makes things more smoothly as a project goes along.

Taryn:

Yes, content’s a big one. And then I’m gonna transition a little bit and ask a question that I have here. But I know it’s a question we get a lot and it is, “Do I need a pre-made theme or a custom theme?” And I’m also gonna throw in here, you and I can both kind of tag team this. But I think that they’re related is like, “Can I build a website by myself?” So I will let you start with the pre-made theme and custom theme because a lot of people ask us about that.

Keith:

Yeah, so I’m a strong advocate for custom themes. Everything that LISI does is custom. I mean, we like to look at the clients and figure out their needs and wants and build a website around that. Pre-made themes. They may offer that elusive quick goal of launching a website. And there’s some benefit to that, I guess. But the problem with that is they’re developed to work in one way. So there’s no really future-proofing thought out given to that because whoever the developer was that made that theme, they know nothing about the companies and firms that are using it. And again, those themes are being used by multiple firms. I mean, whoever wants to go and buy a pre-made theme can use it. A lot of those pre-made themes are also very dependent upon plugins. So they use plugins to do a lot of the heavy lifting of the theme itself. Whereas our custom themes we build, everything is custom and we don’t rely too much on the plugins to really drive everything on the website. A lot of the pre-made themes use a page builder. WPBakery and Elementor are two of the largest known page builders in WordPress environments. And while they may allow an individual to kinda layout a page very quickly using their drag and drop interfaces, they don’t have a lot of the custom functionality that firms that we deal with really, really wanna have on their website. So think about your firm and think about how you want to be able to associate content between various pages, bios with practice areas, and vice versa. News, being able to associate it to an attorney, as the author. Being able to then show that news on the bio’s website on the bio’s page. A lot of these plugins and the page builders don’t have that functionality to do that. So you’re building things out one page at a time, whereas the custom functionality that we build, you can do all that cross association between pages and crosslinking and all that stuff that helps with SEO.

Taryn:

Yeah, and that’s why I kind of added the question about, can I build my own website in here too? Since I had both of them. And I know when I was in-house, I would sometimes get that question. Well, do we really need to hire an agency to do this? Can you build it? What about like my freshman in college? Like he just took a coding class. Can he do it? And the answer is yes, they can, but it might not do what you want to. And you know what? Maybe if you’re a solo practitioner just starting out and it’s just you, that makes sense. Maybe you can get it up quick and easy and you don’t have a ton of content. And I would, by no means, say don’t do it. There are a lot of programs out there where you can build your own website and they look professional. But when you find that most of the clients that come talk to us, as you said, are looking for their websites to do a little bit more than what you can do out of the box. And not only can a developer know how to code and do those kind of things, saving you a lot of time and heartache down the road. But if you work with an agency like ours, that’s done it a lot for law firms. Like we do that day-in and day-out. The example you gave getting your bio to link to the news, to link to all of the other things, there’s some figuring out that needs to happen to that and out of the box solution.

Keith:

Yeah, and the other thing to think about is the future of the website. So, obviously, you’re making a big expense on building a website. You want it to last several years. That doesn’t mean your needs aren’t gonna change a month, six months, a year down the road. If you’re using a pre-made theme, like I said, it’s made to work one way. So it’s very difficult to adapt it and make it change down the road. Whereas a custom theme that we would build, it can be customized at any time. And it’s easier to work with that. So as the firm’s needs change, the website can shift as well.

Taryn:

Yeah. And that kinda brings me to this question and I think it will be our last question. And it is about support after the website’s built. “What kind of support should be expected after a website’s built?” And I’ll start. And then I’m sure Keith will have some to add in here, but that really depends on what you want and the website that you essentially purchased. Time to build an entire website, but definitely have the capabilities to go in and do anything that’ll need to be done once the website is built. Other firms have people who are quite capable of going into the back end of say WordPress and adding an attorney or adding a blog post or doing some things like that, but still want the option to have somebody make bigger changes if they want to add like a whole new practice area or redesign how their news section is set up. And then some people are just like, you know what? I don’t have time for that. I don’t understand that. You handle everything. So it’ll really depend.

Our agency and a lot of agencies will build websites that we want you to have ownership of your website. We want you to be able to do whatever you need to do with your website, whatever you’re comfortable to do with your website. Other agencies basically lease you a website and that’s great if you want it hands-off, but you don’t always get to take it with you. Our thought process is we are here for you if you need us and we will support you in whatever way possible. We make sure that everyone’s trained. We’re always happy to answer questions about how to use the website. A lot of our websites launch with phase two projects. Like things we thought of as we were doing it that we didn’t have the time or the capabilities to execute prior to launch, but that we wanna add-in. So really support, kind of, you get what you pay for. Any reputable agency should definitely stand behind its work. But it really can kind of be however you decide to work it out with your agency. One note that I learned, there are definitely advantages to proprietary websites where essentially, you’re leasing it and you don’t have access to it. But it’s definitely built for one functionality.

We build our websites on WordPress. So one of the nice things about that is there are a lot of people who can work on WordPress because while we like to think all of our clients are extremely happy when they leave us, any time you’re building a website, there is the chance that something goes sour. And so I say this from the personal experience in-house. Sometimes it’s just nice knowing that there’s always a wide variety of people to work on your website and you’re not married to one thing. Keith, did I miss anything on wrapping up a website or what people should be able to do once it goes live?

Keith:

I mean, it’s important just the firm in finding a partner that can support them in any way they need. So like you said, whether or not they’re gonna do everything on their own, or they need someone to help them out, it’s finding that partner to meet their needs and support their goals, whatever it is. And like you mentioned before, in terms of our training, we offer training to anyone at post-launch and then anyone that needs it again, down the road. Someone new gets hired, we’ll do training again. And it’s all done at no extra cost. I mean, as you said, we want people to be able to use their website. We build a website that the firm and anyone else should be able to manage going forward. We’re not tied on backups.

Taryn:

Yeah. And if that’s important to you that should be a conversation you have in the beginning when you’re looking to hire a firm. And if something else is important to you, like those are all good things that you should be discussing on day one, not day 270, because you don’t wanna get to the end and be like, oh, I didn’t understand that. My kids always do this thing at school, like begin with the end in mind. So what is your ultimate goal? And part of that is also what does it look like once the website project is completed and how do you want that relationship to work? So, well, we are right at 30 minutes. So that is about as long as I want to keep people. We have had a great conversation. Obviously, there’s so much to discuss with website design and development. And we really leaned into the development of side of things, but you’ll see more from the design side from us in the coming months. I want to thank Keith for joining me. This was his first time in the hot seat on a LISI Live. So thank you very much for being a great partner today.

Thank you to audience for joining us. Next up. You can catch us next week when we launch our newest podcast episode. It is going to be a One More Thing with Robyn Addis talking to Patrick Fuller about their panel at Legal Week. And I think that was February or March. So happy Friday, everyone. Go Phillies today and we will see you on an upcoming LISI Live. Thank you. Bye bye.