Having a web developer on your team is fundamental to your law firm’s online marketing success. Whether you hire a third-party or have an in-house web developer, you need to be able to communicate effectively to get the results you’re after.
Knowing how to tell your web developer what you want in your website’s design makes the process more efficient, cost-effective, and profitable. Getting the absolute best results from your web developer comes down to the following key factors.
Define Your Objectives
Your website helps your law firm generate leads, nurture prospective clients, serve as a valuable legal resource, become an industry authority, and help prospects learn more about your services.
Web design must begin with a clearly defined set of objectives. Mistakes occur when law firms and their web developers fail to outline the objectives of a website’s design.
Web design objectives ultimately dictate the decisions you’ll make as you move forward. They provide a standard by which to measure the results you achieve so that you can monitor your progress over time.
Keep Your Goals Focused
Trying to accomplish too much at once is a common mistake made by law firms and their web developers. In addition to having clear objectives, it’s important to keep your goals focused.
Avoid requesting a large number of design concepts from your developer. Although this may seem like the best way to get the design you want, it makes the process more time-consuming, costly, and ineffective.
A website design works as an integrated whole. But many law firms choose different elements from multiple design concepts only to create a mismatched website that tries to accomplish too many things at once.
A more useful approach is to communicate clearly with your web developer in the early stages of the design process. This lets you guide the design as you move forward and make the important decisions at each step along the way.
Ongoing Communication
Many web developers work in isolation and submit their design concepts once they’ve been completed. But this leads to unwanted issues that delay and disrupt the entire design process.
Misunderstandings may be overlooked, which causes web developers to work off of incorrect information. This gives your law firm an inferior design that may fail to meet its objectives.
Maintaining ongoing communication is essential to a successful website design. Your web developer should be accessible for you to provide feedback or input related to your site’s design.
Setting up a communication schedule prevents many common pitfalls, and law firms should communicate with their web developers on at least a monthly basis. This prevents the need for large-scale changes that lead to expensive redesigns.
Testing is What Matters
Creative differences may arise during a website design. Although this is an inevitable part of any creative collaboration, it’s important to remember that results are what matter most.
Your law firm or its web developer will likely have opinions about what will or won’t work in your website’s design.
But opinions matter far less than real-life numbers. Testing and optimization are critical components to the long-term success of your website. Analytics related to your site’s performance should be prioritized over personal opinions and preferences.
Testing your website with users gives you insights that improve its design, increase its ability to accomplish business goals, and resolve conflicts between your law firm and its web developer.
Knowing how to tell your web developer what you want in your law firm’s website design requires that you consider a wide range of factors.
Clearly defined goals, ongoing communication, and a reliance on testing make it easy for you and your developer to achieve a successful website design.
How has your law firm been able to improve the results you achieve when working with a web developer? Let us know what strategies have worked and what challenges you’ve come across in the comments below.
