It is finally spring. The flowers are blooming. The grass is greener. The birds are chirping. And it is time for spring cleaning. Your website, that is.

Join Taryn Elliott, Director of Client Success + Marketing at LISI, and Rae Ritter, Director of Client Service + Marketing at LISI, as they dive into three of the things you should consider when spring cleaning your law firm’s website. Hear the tips and tricks they share about spring cleaning your attorney bios, focusing on the industries you serve, and checking in on some of the overlooked areas – the footer, the C.M.S., and how it looks on mobile devices.

Taryn:

Hi everyone, I am Taryn Elliot, the Director of Client Success + Marketing here at LISI. And thank you for joining us for our April livestream of Three Things. And this is all about spring cleaning your website. I am joined by Rae Ritter, Director of Client Service + Marketing at LISI, who is our website guru. And I’m very excited. It’s April, like spring is coming. I dunno about your neighborhood, but here there’s like, flowers have been popping up for a month, so I’m ready for it.

Yes, the flowers are definitely making their way out earlier this year than normal, but I’m really looking forward to, being able to open the windows again and wear flip flops and all of those kinds of rite of passage things that that’s April Springs. I mean, of course, it could still snow in April. It could be freezing cold in May, but like we’re getting there getting past winter. So I actually don’t like cleaning, but I love spring cleaning because it is just like you said, windows open. Like I will clean out the windowsill just to make sure I can open the window. So sometimes I open the window and then I’m like, “Ooh my window sill needs to be cleaned” and now I’m cleaning the windows. And that was not my intention, but I agree. I don’t particularly love cleaning, I like having a clean house, so that’s a bit of a problem. But I do like spring cleaning and I like the idea of really digging in and cleaning up the things that you don’t normally deal with when cleaning your house because I don’t know about you, but I do not have time to get my house deep cleaned once a week. No, not the Martha Stewart way. Not here either. No.

So, well, while we’re spring cleaning houses and you know, kind of getting all of our lives, personal lives in order, this is also a good time to spring clean your website. We are always on our websites and looking at them and you know occasionally it’ll be like, “Ooh there’s a typo that we didn’t catch”. Or this person is now admitted in a new state. We need to add that. We hadn’t done that yet, but there’s a lot of things that in our day-to-day with our websites we don’t even think about. And so today we’re gonna talk about three of them, three of the ones that we thought were really important to consider or possibly overlooked. And so Rae, do you have anything to add before we jump into the three things?

Rae:

Nope, I’m ready to go.

Taryn:

Okay, well I will hand it over to you for our first one, which is attorney bios. Probably our first one and our biggest one.

Rae:

And to be honest, I think that most people are routinely updating those things you mentioned like the is the most recent award, a speaking engagement, this person’s now admitted in another state. I think that most folks who are managing the website have that kind of hardwired like you learn about it, you add it, you update on the website, those bios should be getting updated routinely as those things happen. Now with that said, the reason why we have this on our list for today is I think the part of the bio that does, that gets overlooked that we really want you, we want everyone to look at in the spring a couple times a year, is that narrative part of the bio. And you know, I think a lot of people take a lot of time to write it in the beginning when the attorney comes or perhaps when there’s a relaunch of the website looking at like, okay, is this in the right tone or am I saying the things I want? But it still makes sense to routinely look at it.

Actually, I recently spoke with some other folks at an L.M.A. program in the Mid-Atlantic and one of the things that I harped on in that program was looking at your website through today’s lens. Like is there anything on that website that you know was perfectly neutral five years ago or whenever it was written, but today kind of sends red flags. And actually, this is interesting, this week something like that popped up. we’re about to launch a website bio. We are reviewing the content for a very tenured, very respected attorney in this firm who you can read it seeps out. He loves what he does, he loves practicing law. And it said in the bio that this attorney talks about courts and trials and sounds like a man with an addiction. And while we understand that the sentiment means he is just, his whole world is law, it says like he goes on vacation and like goes into courts in other cities and wants to check out what’s going on. And he loves that, he loves it. So I mean that’s all great, that message is good, but the wording is sensitive.

I mean, starting with the national like opioid crisis there’s lots of people who are affected or have family members or friends who are affected by that. And then compound that with the fact that within the legal industry there’s other prevalent addictions with alcohol and other drugs and things so that to use that word in a way that is meant to shed positive light when it actually has just other things that we should be aware of that are not kind of off on the sideline. This is like front page of the paper subject matter with addiction. So, I mean, it seems like a little thing, but it actually, he wrote about, he referenced that in a few places again to show basically he’s obsessed with practicing law. He loves it so much, it’s in his blood, it’s in his D.N.A., but changing the language a little bit because at the time that it was written, which I imagine was at least 10 years ago, I could be wrong, but it was written well before they came to LISI for us to help launch their new site. It just was something for us to flag. And I think that there’s little nuggets of that that you’ll find in your attorney’s bios that seemed completely neutral at the time it was written.

I’m not trying to like slap anyone’s hand for putting it in there in the first place, but now that it’s spring and we’re doing this spring cleaning of the websites, now is a good time to look at that narrative, the part that gets overlooked that should not be set and forget. Just one more thing about that narrative that I would say, it’s just kind of a little harder aspect of reviewing the bios is does your bio… Do the attorney bios answer the question? Like, how do you solve my problem? I’m coming to your site, I’m a potential client. What problems do you solve? How can you help me? So it’s important to think about I worked at a firm where 15 years ago and we launched a website, it started out with this lawyer is in this practice, this practice, this practice, and this practice. And while that was a true sentence, it wasn’t really helpful for a person coming to the site to say, well, but I need help with this kind of problem. I can’t tell from that sentence if you, if you can help solve my problem. So kind of front-loading the problem-solving factor is another recommendation as you go through and review the narrative of the bios. I think those are the things that I want to drive home with reviewing the attorney bios as part of your spring cleaning.

Taryn:

Well, and I think adding onto that too, like if you haven’t stripped out jargon or defined terms that people might not understand, that goes a long way too when you’re making these reviews. I know that there’s kind of been a change in over, it’s been happening over the last many years of getting bios and just everything on a law firm website to be more focused on the user who might not have a legal background and to be easy to read, but also tailored for your audience. I mean maybe the people you work with are attorneys and they understand all of that. And also the other thing I was gonna say on that is consider if your practice has evolved as well. Sometimes you add a practice area to the side, but in the narrative, you don’t think to add new representative matters or really talk about maybe how you’ve developed a niche practice in your area of law. So this is also a good time to kind of be thinking through those things as well ’cause you wanna put your best foot forward and really portray what you’re doing in your bio.

Rae:

Absolutely.

Taryn:

Thank you so much. I think we talk about it a lot, bios are one of the most important aspects of your law firm’s website.

Rae:

Absolutely.

Taryn: For so many reasons so definitely.

Rae:

And they’re the pages of your site that get the most views. So if you don’t believe me, look at your Google Analytics bios are getting looked at more than all the other pages. So that’s where you want to focus some extra time.

Taryn:

Perfect, well moving on, our next topic is footer mobile and C.M.S. And really I just kind of combined these things that are important, but that might often be overlooked as you’re kind of, everyone thinks, oh, bios and, for some law firms you could have 200 bios to look at and that’s a project and as we said, that’s really important. But these three things are things that are important because they contain information that when a prospect or a client needs it, they need it. And if they can’t find it, that can be a problem and really kind of leave, a bad taste in their mouth. So first of all, the footer, which is just the content you have at the very bottom of every single page. Just take a look at it, make sure everything’s correct, the grammar’s correct, punctuation’s correct. The content you have down there is correct for instance, maybe you added an office or you removed an office, that got updated on your contact page, but did that get updated in the footer

Rae:

And also the copyright year? And your development company should set that up to automatically change when on January one, but in the event they have not set that up to automatically update. You want that. I mean it’s such a little thing that can make your site look like you haven’t updated the whole site since whatever date that’s is in there.

Taryn:

Yes. And especially for a law firm, you wanna make sure all your Is are crossed and all your Is are dotted and your Ts are crossed.

Rae:

There we go.

Taryn:

Because that’s what people expect from you when they’re hiring you to do their work. Which also in the footer is often legal disclaimers. So generally a legal, legal, you’ll link to a legal disclaimer. So of course make sure all your link links work, but definitely your links to the legal disclaimers and it might not be a bad time to take a look at those as well to see if there’s anything that changed. And then a lot of times people have social media icons and the thing here that you wanna, of course, again, make sure the links work, make sure that the symbol is correct, but also have you added a presence on social media or stopped using any of them. So for instance, a lot of firms are starting to add Instagram, maybe that hasn’t been added to the footer yet. Maybe you’ve decided for instance like Facebook isn’t for you and you could take that off or we don’t see it so much now, but for a while we had a lot of firms who still had Google Plus,

Rae:

I was just gonna say that. I just saw one, a link to one recently and I clicked, I was like, where is this going to be?

Taryn:

I was thinking that we were probably away from that. But it’s a good example of how sometimes you have a platform and it just changes and it needs to be updated. And finally for the footer attorney advertising, and generally this is something we go through when we launch websites or we look at websites do you live in a jurisdiction where the rules of professional conduct require you to have some kind of attorney advertising or other disclaimer on your website? And to be fair, doesn’t need to be in the footer or the header. There’s some other things to consider. So check your rules. This is especially important if you have a new office or even possibly a new attorney or an attorney admitted to a new jurisdiction, professional rules about when you’re being liable for following them very. But definitely if you’ve had some changes, check that out. And then the next thing that is sometimes overlooked is mobile, which of course when designing a website, this is something that you consider but you know, things happen or you add new pages.

So just taking some time to really go through and look at your website on mobile, which is phones and tablets and they all come in various sizes and there are tools that can help you what does my website look like on this device versus that device? But keep in mind on mobile, it’s not just a little tiny version of your website, you are presenting the information in a way that’s easy to navigate and easy to understand on your mobile phone. So the example on this slide here, this is not what their website looks like on a desktop, but as you can see when you go to this homepage, it’s really easy to find where you want to go next.

Rae:

Also as it’s warming up outside, I recommend doing mobile testing and review outside on your phone maybe in the sunshine. I mean I candidly I think through that, like if I have to do mobile testing on a site, I think, well if I don’t need to be tied to my space, where can I be? So a lot of times it happens like in my patio.

Taryn:

Or even this is if you have a long commute you could do that. That’s kind of the nice thing about mobile. And as you’re going through all the pages, make sure especially pages like contact info, news, even bios, the pages people are most likely to view on mobile are easy to read and clean. You’re not having to zoom in or slide back and forth to get the content. Consider if you added any new pages this year, especially if you kind of changed the way a template looked, is that rendering properly on mobile? And last thing, just make sure your phone numbers are clickable and your directions are linked. And then finally in this section of things that might be forgotten about the C.M.S. or the backend. And this is really just kind of going in and looking at things such as are the fields labeled and easy to use. Is it intuitive? If I wasn’t adding this, would somebody else be able to figure out what might need to be there? Or is it labeled in a way that I can consistently enter the same information? Especially for pages you frequently update like bios and news and then your asset library. And I know I’m guilty of this we get so busy we tend to just upload everything into a general file.

So this is absolutely the best time of year to make sure you’re going in and saying images go here in these folders and documents, go here in these folders and downloadable items go here, or whatever your file system is, but just make sure it’s organized, make sure everything is clearly titled, especially items you download. You don’t want somebody to download an item and then they have it on the desktop and it’s some kind of shorthand name that you use internally or it’s really generic and people are like, “What is this file on my desktop?” And also, are they even still available on your website? If they’re not available on your website, you can just go ahead and clean ’em out. And on the subject to downloads, this isn’t necessarily happening in your C.M.S., it might also be happening in your marketing automation tool, but if you have an item that’s downloaded from your website, is it being delivered in the way that it is expected to? And we see it happen all the time, just a random glitch or a system update causes something to break along the way. And there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to get information from a website, especially if you’re deciding who to hire and not being able to get that.

Rae:

Oh sorry, on your comment about the cms, I think that actually just came up with Taryn with you and I talking to a client recently who’s this was a site that our head of development was not involved with. And the client said, “Why is this bio not publishing the way I expect?” And there was a field that had to be filled out in order, there was like a threshold, if this field is filled out, it will publish. If this field is left empty, it will not publish. And in fact, I think there were two fields, and I’m sure at the time that that site was developed, the developer thought, well of course how would a bio ever be posted with that like body the main narrative or how would it ever be posted?

Taryn:

And sometimes like, and specifically on that website, like that’s a differentiator because you were trying to accomplish a secondary thing as well. But yes, sometimes in the design and development phase, we miss issues that might come up down the road. And this is a perfect example.

Rae:

So the solution is not to change the development of that site. The solution is to cr to just make a little note by the field header on the back end of the C.M.S. so that when the person who was working when the site launched, knew how to do it and then the next person knew how to do it. But now like the fourth person down the line who wasn’t involved at the beginning doesn’t know the answers. To have those little like cheat sheets can be really helpful. I mean, I find them helpful on sites that we do build. Because I mean it’s dozens and dozens and dozens of sites and they each have their own unique build. What if you don’t remember some like really obscure detail? Wow, would it be great if you had a note on it and the note was where you need it when you need it.

Taryn:

The one I find that also that really benefits is image uploads, especially if you have to upload multiple versions of an image. What do I need the square one here? Do I need a rectangle of one here? Do I need a very small thumbnail? Do I need a larger photo? So I always really appreciate knowing, okay, like this is the pixel sizes that I need for this image here and these are the pixel sizes I need for this image over here

Rae:

It just makes it easier for everybody and I mean it takes like an extra moment. And the thought like, okay.

Taryn:

Yeah, and on that note as well, as you’re going through this review of your C.M.S., it’s also a good time to say, is there something I’m doing every time and it seems like it’s taking me longer or more steps and is there maybe a way to go back to my development team and say, “Hey, is there a streamlined way to do this?” Or our practice has evolved and so we want to change the way we convey this information. A couple hours of your time now in development might save the marketing team internally a lot of time down the road and sometimes there are just projects that become phase two projects. It’s something that we thought of that was out of scope and we weren’t able to execute during the initial development because we would’ve launched too late or whatever the case might be. It’s like moving into a new house. You have all these plans and you think as soon as I move in I’m gonna do these 15 things and you get to about five of ’em and then sometimes you kind of forget about the other ones. So this is also another time to go back in and say, “Hey, there were these other ideas that we had that might make sense to implement now. Okay and then finally our third thing, I’ll hand it back over to you Rae.

Rae:

All right, so our third thing of our “Three Things for Spring Cleaning Your Website” is focusing on industry pages or really just focusing on industry in general. So if possible it would be great to create new page types for industry and have those be like a landing page so that the people come into your site, the clients prospects kind of can frame their experience to their world. “Hey, I work in the entertainment industry, what are the things that you do for me?” What, like I know maybe maybe a person coming into the site is coming here for contracts and negotiations related to something in the entertainment industry. But if you have a full page of these are all the ways that we service this industry and we can present that in context here, maybe someone would find that, “Hey I didn’t know you also do intellectual property and that’s something I need or my entertainer’s need or whatever that is. I could think of other examples like implement and labor law issues would be important when working in this particular industry or an example is like, the finances and venture capital, managing venture capital funds, and that kind of thing.

So those might be things that the person coming to the site doesn’t even know that you do or that they need it. So it may not be possible or may not be easy to create these new pages to develop them out, design them out, write all the content that that might be a heavier lift, something to put kind of on the side burner. But if that’s not possible, then I would think about having a section on at least a practice page. These are the industries we service for this type of work. And then linking to the other related practices that might impact or might service this industry that you’re talking about. So you could probably get creative within the current design or really kind of offer more of a full service view into what you do for an industry with a full industry page. And I was actually thinking about this, we’re getting ready to pack for a trip coming up and I’m shopping online for children’s swimsuits and then I see like, oh, add swim goggles and fast dry towels and all these other things and it’s like, aha, you know that I’m looking for this.

Maybe you could show me something like really close to it that I might also need. And when I was in my last big firm in house, we were always talking about cross servicing. Like how can you bring in a client and then not silo them in one service or one industry but, or pardon me, practice area. How can you service that client in other services in other ways? So I think that’s kind of like the secret sauce to keeping clients longer, right? If they’re plugged into different service lines. So anyway, like I said, I think that’s something you can do there. There can be a big, a big lift with development or a smaller lift with really just updating the content on the page. And again, that’s something that we don’t think about throughout the year as you’re looking at your website as you’re adding new news and events and things. But hey, this is the time for spring cleaning, take a good look at it. And this too, you can sit on your couch you don’t even have to be your desk. How would we like rethink doing this or communicating how we provide services to folks in different industries.

Taryn:

Well and I love this because as soon as you were talking about this, having also been in-house like yeah, like cross-serving clients is, it’s a big discussion for marketing departments. It’s a big discussion for business development departments if they’re separate, it’s a big discussion for client success teams within law firms. It’s a big discussion for attorneys. So this is one that really hits everybody. And even one way to approach it would maybe be to talk to your accounting department or your finance department who might be able to give you a list of clients or even further than that, categorize them. And you can really sit down and say, “Okay, here are the clients we have, here are the industries that they break down in, and here are the services that they’re either already purchasing from us or that they could be.” And really I love the idea that if you don’t have the resources to build out completely new industry pages there are ways to definitely incorporate that information into practice area pages.

And I think we’re seeing clients do that a lot where we’re seeing more and more clients are putting the related practices links on those practice area pages because as you said, we know the more invested a client is with a firm, the more likely they are to keep working with the firm. And really it just solidifies that relationship, especially for potential clients. If you’re working in the entertainment industry, you might be thinking of all the different legal services that you need for your business, but you also might not be thinking of that. And much better to be able to get it all from one place. It’s just easier and more efficient. So I really, I love this. Thank you so much for sharing it. Well Rae, we have gone through all three things. Anything else to add before we wrap up here?

Rae:

No, I’m really excited for spring. Somehow more this year than ever. I’m ready for it.

Taryn:

Yes, I feel like it’s been a very dreary winter. Like we didn’t get a ton of snow. And so like it’s just been cold and gray.

Rae:

Same.

Yeah, I am definitely also ready for spring. I’ll take spring rain. That’s fine with me. But I just need a break from the winter for a little bit and I like the winter. So that’s saying something. Well, thank you to Rae for joining me on this and sharing her insights on spring cleaning your law firm website. Thank you to all of you for either tuning into our livestream or catching this on our website or on our podcast. We will be back next Friday at 12:30 PM Eastern time on LinkedIn livestreaming our “Ask Me Anything.” And this is a really relevant topic, it’s “Ask Me Anything About Google Analytics 4,” which is rolling out this summer. Whether you like it or not, Google’s been talking about it for a long time. We’ve been talking about it too, but it’s April and that drop-dead deadline will be here before you know it. So tune in next Friday for “Ask Me Anything on Google Analytics 4.” And thank you so much. Have a great weekend. Bye, everybody.