Law Firm Marketing - 10 Things to Help Your Website Not Stink

LLRX.com has published an article by Andy Havens called So your firm’s got a website. Great. But is it stuck in 1997?.

"For those of you lawyers and firms with websites, (...) I’m going to make a broad, sweeping generalization – they stink. I know you’d like to think I’m talking about everybody’s site except yours, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that yours does, too(...) I don’t mean to be rude, I mean to be honest. So... with apologies to the delicate sensibilities of all the lawyers in the audience, here are the '10 Things to Help Your Site Not... Stink'."

This is sure to make people mad, but it might spark debate.

In order of increasing importance, according to the author, here are the things that stink and need to be fixed:

• Bad lawyer bio pictures
• Uneven lawyer bios - some are pages long, others terse and short
• E-mail addresses on the site will attract spam
• Bad use of Flash
• Unchanging home pages
• Inconsistent navigational aids
• Little interaction with visitors
• Organization by practice group (no one outside the law cares or knows what the hell they are)
• Meaningless marketing blahblah statements (everyone is for "excellence" and "highest ethical standards")
• No blogs ("public relations on steroids and a sugar high at the same time")

I was keeping score as I went through the list. I won't tell you how many of the above flaws our website has. Let's say: lots, to be honest.