Firms on the web – get with the times
Over the last six months we have invested a great deal of time simply reviewing how a website should be designed to meet the challenges for a firm wanting to be successful on the web. It is interesting stuff and certainly our findings have shaped out development policy. So what is our position on a some of these issues.
Follow the rules. Google and other search engines make it very clear what they are looking for. This includes real content that is useful, descriptive url’s, user friendly internal links, clear and easy navigation, descriptive key words within content and sitemaps that help index your site. Basically, anything that makes the visitor (and search engine) experience easy and useful. That means no frames (which have no content), making content difficult to access, flash and other things that slow down indexing and page loading.
News and other feeds. News feeds typically provide information that most clients can get in hundreds of other places. So don’t place too much emphasis on feeds making your site look current. The technology used to place feeds of your site also do nothing to help you in the eyes of Google and chances are clients wont read it anyway.
Update your landing page. Probably the most important page of your site. This is a great place to help visitors get a clear picture about your firm. I have spoken to many people about defining their firms “personality” and here is the place. One of the things that we suggest here is a brief note about typical issues that your firm has faced that week or month - even a brief review about where you have help a client. (Incidentally, the technology we use automatically tells the search engines when you have added a note).
Be easy to contact. You would be suprised to see how many firms do not have a phone number on their site – they mask ALL enquiries behins a contact form. I am in favour of contact forms, particularly when contacts are automatically added to a database for easy contact at a later date, but to make your firm unreachable is crazy.
Nic Gadaleta
