Creating an award winning legal website

Govan Law Centre’s bank charges website (www.bankcharges.info) recently won the Lightershade Legal Website of the Year award at the Cuthbert Scottish Legal Awards 2008. Many law firms now have a website (or more than one), but what makes the difference between an ordinary legal website and a great one?

Why have a bank charges website?

Govan Law Centre is a small practice and, acting for individuals, could only hope to assist a handful of people with this issue. Therefore, we decided to set up a self-help website that explained the legal issues in an understandable way – and, crucially, offered free downloadable letters to be sent to the banks and advice and downloadable styles on how to raise small claims against the banks in Scotland and in England & Wales.

The website has been a runaway success, allowing us to assist many more individuals than we would have been able to do by conventional means. For example, over 1,000,000 style letters have been downloaded, and hundreds of people have emailed the website to thank us for the help in reclaiming charges. Those people have reclaimed over £500,000 in total, to say nothing of the amounts which others have claimed and not told us about. It is conservatively estimated that the total amounts reclaimed by bank customers across the UK is in excess of £5,000,000.

Website design

The website was designed and created by Govan-based web design company Kuka Studios.

The Scottish Legal Awards judge the best legal website using a variety of criteria, which can be summed up in three points: design, usability and content.

• Design

What makes a good design is subject to opinion, and what works for one law firm may not work for another. However, a good design has some key elements: clarity of text, appropriate use of colour, and a good balance between menus, text and images. Be creative. If your website looks the same as all of your competitors, then your designer hasn’t done their job. You should stand out, but try to avoid using heavy images and flash introductions to do so. Company firewalls can block flash- and frame-based websites, and these techniques hinder the ability of search engines to find your company – so it won’t matter how amazing your site looks if no one can find it! These websites will also take longer to download, meaning that your customers could get bored of waiting before they even see your key message.

• Usability

A website’s usability is judged on ease of use, ability to find relevant information, accessibility for those with limited internet experience or disabilities, and efficiency of the navigation system. A good website should download quickly, allow users to find what they are looking for in two or three clicks, and have a comprehensive site map.

The easiest way to aid usability is to make sure pages are direct and to the point. Try to make your pages “printer friendly”, to allow your customers to print out information to read later. Another easy change is having clear navigation to allow customers to find and access whatever part of the site is relevant to them.

If you can, offer your website content in several languages. If you show that you are willing to talk to clients in their own tongue, you will win them over much faster.

• Content

No matter how much experience you have in writing legal documents, this will not prepare you for marketing your business, so hire a copywriter. They will turn your legal blurb into legible, sales material for your customer. An experienced web copywriter will also make the content rich with the right keywords, to aid search engine optimisation work.

Another important rule is to make your content worth reading. Don’t make your site an elaborate business card, telling everyone how great you are – give people a reason to stay on your site. The www.bankcharges.info site is purely informational, designed to give free help to those in need.

If possible, offer downloadable documents and brochures, allowing clients to read about your company without having to stay online, but make sure to keep it relevant. If you have a news/events page, update it once a week. Nothing will put a customer off faster than thinking the last time you were in the news was 1993!

Prompt visitors to act, have a call to action on every page: whether it’s a simple “call us for more information” or “click here to find out more”, you need to get people to interact with your website to make it successful.

When you have the basics down, you can add all the extra functions you want like a blog, or a log-in function for customers. However, these are extras. If the rest of your website is poor, no one will get as far as trying these out.