Ward and Smith Attorneys at Law
Rebuilding a Prominent Law Firm's Web Presence
Overview
Ward and Smith, P.A. is a full service business law firm with five offices across North Carolina, more than eighty attorneys, and nearly thirty practice groups, from Agribusiness to Zoning. The Firm approached New Media Campaigns with some ideas about what it wanted out of a new website—mainly, an updated, more premium web experience featuring a simpler, more unified design that was more manageable and in line with today's web standards. NMC designed and developed the site, working closely with Ward and Smith to ensure the final product was exceptional. Along the way, NMC identified and addressed several key areas for improvement on the new site:
- Design and Usability: the previous site was slow, outdated, and difficult to navigate with multiple menus and inconsistent design conventions. Importantly, Ward and Smith didn't feel that the site catered to their premium target market. NMC redesigned the site to be more interactive, dynamic, and immersive, featuring clean lines, prominent headlines, and clear site navigation.
- Search Engine Optimization: Old URLs were not optimized and the site structure had become sprawling and inefficient. The new site was developed on NMC's HiFi Content Management System, improving the URL structure while optimizing and automating the SEO process.
- Content Management and Control: On the old site, updates had to be funneled through the IT department before being published to the site. Using HiFi allowed us to cut out the middleman and eliminate bottlenecks in the publishing of new content. Content migration, 301 redirects, and site structure simplification ensured that the new site would hit the ground running.
Quick Facts
Easy-to-navigate Attorney Directory with individual attorney pages
Hundreds of articles that can be easily managed and updated from one central location
Snappy site performance ensures smooth browsing experience
Quick Links keep popular and relevant links close at hand
Page-dependent support information and links make experience more interactive
Simplified hierarchical site structure ensures better search engine optimization
Design and Usability
A Little Planning Goes a Long Way
The NMC Designed Homepage
During the original site planning discussions, NMC and Ward and Smith worked closely together to create both the design and development concepts for the new site. Because the Firm is so large, it was important to start with a well thought out site structure, so that content could easily be found, updated, and added in a logical and systematic way. Speed was also an important factor, both in terms of navigating and in terms of raw pageload speed—Ward and Smith's target clients are high-end, often web-savvy customers. In order to create a premium web experience that would mirror the premium services offered by the firm, it was important that the site both looked great and also performed well. To that end, the new site features clean lines, lots of white space, bold fonts, large titles, and carefully chosen photos and graphics.
The old site had both a top menu and a sidebar, making navigation a bit cumbersome. Where before there were fourteen different menu navigation choices on the homepage, we have now streamlined all of those links into four headings in a sleek top menu. From those choices, you can then navigate further into the site via drop down menus. Once on a page, a sidebar contains helpful links that are relevant to your location on the site. For example, navigating to an attorney bio will yield the attorney's practice groups, practice concentrations, and any recent articles he or she has authored. When viewing the About Us page, Quick Links and Recent News guide you to other areas of the site that may also be of interest. Additionally, the new site features breadcrumbs to help orient a visitor during their browsing.
An important feature of such a large, multicity firm is a comprehensive, fast, and useful attorney search tool. Whether a visitor is searching for an attorney by name, location or practice group, the search tool makes it easy to quickly find who you're looking for.
Development
Streamlining for Speed and Ease of Use
Much of the development of the new site centered around improving organization and improving speed, both keys for a successful website, and crucial for a large firm spread out amongst five different North Carolina cities. The site was developed on the HiFi Content Management System, which automatically builds in much of this organization, efficiency, and speed. Through our own development and design principles, aided by HiFi, we were able to accomplish a number of development goals on this project:
- Radically improved site performance. The new site feels snappy and responsive, taking only fifteen percent of the time required by the old site to load pages.
- Site restructuring: Using HiFi, we created a clear hierarchical site structure, making proper use of page tags for SEO targeting, and cut down on multiple views of same page items, which helps search engines in their indexing of the site.
- Elimination of the Middle Man: Previously, the marketing department had to send all content updates to the IT department before it could be added to the website. This caused a bottleneck and prevented the smooth flow of information to the site. HiFi allows easier content management, eliminating a step in the process and allowing the marketing team to manage content directly.
- Centralization and simplification of content: All content is tied together on the front end and managed from single HiFi entities, making it much easier to manage new content additions. For example, when a new article is added, it automatically posts to the appropriate attorney bio, to the homepage, to the related practice group page and in the main articles listing. By building this content management centralization into the site, we are able to save the Firm valuable time that they would otherwise spend iterating content or links.
- Content Migration and 301 Redirects: Because of the size of the site and the depth of information (including articles, news, and individual bios for each of more than eighty attorneys), successful migration of the old site's content was no small task. However, thanks to the early stage planning and site tree mapping, everything was organized logically and optimized for future content management or migration to make the process more streamlined and time efficient. The 301 redirects ensure that the new site hits the ground running, as all the search information linked to the old site now points to the new site, providing continuity of pagerank and searchability.
Result
Both NMC and Ward and Smith are very pleased with the new site. It represents a large step forward for the firm and is an excellent example of the value we can provide at a reasonable cost. The firm had shopped around and received quotes from other prominent web design firms in addition to New Media. In the end, they chose to work with a local company with law firm experience. This project also represents a great symbiotic relationship between agency and client—the firm was open to our ideas and process, and we were careful to listen to their goals, implement the site according to their vision and providing them with a high level of service along the way. In the end, it was a great win-win relationship that resulted in a deceptively simple website that will serve the Firm well moving forward.