The design of your website can influence whether or not a client will choose you. One problem I often find is poor navigation. If someone has trouble or gets confused when searching through your website, they will likely leave your website and search for another legal expert. Think about when you go to a website and you can’t find what you are looking for… you leave. If you can’t find the information that you are looking for within the first 8 seconds, you are likely to leave that website and move on to the next site that appears in the search engine. You may have the more relevant content, but if the user can’t find it, then it doesn’t matter.
Intuitive navigation is important to create a lead. If you do a search for bankruptcy law firms in Dallas you come across the website for Dallas bankruptcy lawyer, Harriet Langston. The navigation for her website is intuitive and easy to use. She has a column on the left side with her core pages listed at the top and the areas of practice links listed underneath.
Having a good navigation isn’t hard to do. Before you design your website, think about the topics you want to discuss and what pages you need. Then arrange them into categories and subcategories. A quick way is to create index cards with each topic and create an outline. Decide on a few core Pages (Home, Practice Area, Our Firm, Contact Us, etc…) and work from there. Click here for more information about web standards for your website.
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I’ve built my own website a few years ago and add pages regularly, but when I have people go to it I often hear that they get confused. I think its cause my navigation is too crazy. I started putting together a list of the pages I have and I’m going to try to simplify the navigation. The index card trick sounds like a good idea. Any other tips?