By Art Italo
If you are wondering if you should have a web page for your firm or solo practice, or if you currently have a page and you would like to improve its traffic and appeal, this article may be of help.
Audio is available using ToolVox Player (It's FREE from Voxware). If you don't have it, select this link to download the ToolVox Player. When I first decided to create my own home page in June of 1996, I was starting from ground zero on the web. I had never even browsed the web prior to that. Since then, I have built my own page from scratch. Most everything I learned, I learned by browsing the web (there is a wealth of information on EVERYTHING including building your own home page). As I write this (about three months later) my page has grown to over 20 articles with graphics, audio, and numerous links from search engines and other legal web sites. At the beginning of the third month of the site's existence, I installed a counter. During that month I recorded over 800 hits. Since then the number of hits has just kept increasing. I tell you this, not to convince you how wonderful I am, but to demonstrate to you that building a successful home page is not all that difficult or daunting. Like anything else, there are some conventions to learn, some new words to master, and some tactics that have a high probability of getting results. If you were smart and persistent enough to make it through law school and pass the bar, this will be a piece of cake. This article attacks the World Wide Web from the ground up. To avoid boring those of you who already have a web page or have reached a certain level of sophistication, I have outlined the topics below with links to the parts of the article that might interest you. If you prefer, you can just scroll down to find the parts you want. Topics Should I Have My Own Home Page? Finding An Internet Service Provider Building An Effective Site Designing Your Site Using Your Site As A Newsletter Building Traffic To Your Site Scroll Down To Read All Topics From The Beginning Should I Have My Own Home Page? The simple answer to this is yes! Like it or not, the World Wide Web (WWW) is here to stay. It is growing exponentially and it is opening a whole new dimension to communication and commerce. The internet is in its infancy and it is already estimated that billions of dollars in transactions are either initiated by or transacted on the web. That being said, there is a caveat. At this stage in the Web's development, you are not likely to generate much new business from your web page. Your monetary return on invested time will probably be low. There are a number of reasons for this. Though the penetration of the personal computer is fairly high and climbing, and almost all new computers now come equipped with an internet browser, the real penetration of the web into everyday life is as yet negligible. A great number of people have access to the internet, but the number of people who use it regularly and think of it as a commercial resource is still very small. Worldwide access to information is very exciting, but the great majority of law practices are locally based. When looking for a lawyer, the internet is not going to cross most people's minds as a way to find one. They are still much more likely to ask a friend or pick up the phone book. So, if there is no money in it, why do it? Because I'm betting there is going to be a pile of money in it in the not too distant future. Many of the things you need to do business over the net are being developed. Live Audio and Video are already a reality. Two way conversation, now limited to typing e-mail messages and online chats, will soon progress to audiovisual images between users. E-mail capabilities will be expanded to where you will be able to send audio and video messages through the net. One of the big impediments to doing business on the internet is the lack of ability to do secure money transactions. Giving your credit card number is always a risky adventure in today's internet environment. Before long, however, a system of cybercash will be developed where transactions will be made without credit cards and money can be e-mailed to someone's account. Another drag on internet commerce is the slowness of the system. People don't like to wait for pages to load, and this discourages them from browsing the web. Right now, cable companies and telephone companies are in a race to make the web bigger, better, faster and more accessible. This will induce more of your prospective clients to come online and it will increase your chances of getting business. So why jump in now? Why not wait? The reason is the learning curve. If you become a web aficionado now, when things are relatively simple, you will be able to learn about the new technologies bit by bit as they develop. This gives you an edge over people who try to jump in when it is more fully developed and complex. Finding An Internet Service Provider Your first step in building a web site is finding an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The chances are you are not going to want to set up your own server (this is very expensive). You are going to want to house your site on someone else's server. Essentially, you will be renting space on the ISP's computer. Thus, when someone hits your web site, they are actually reading your material while visiting this remote server. Finding an ISP is pretty easy. There are numerous providers around the world. I use MindSpring, which is a fast growing national provider. One ISP you might want to check out if you are a lawyer is The Seamless Website. This is an ISP that focuses on the legal profession. In addition to hosting your site, they provide design services and consulting to help you get started. Most ISP's provide an account which includes an address for your site called an URL (Uniform Resource Locator). This is how people find you on the net. Some providers can provide you with a virtual domain name. This means the provider's name is not included in your URL. To the outside world it looks like you have your own server. This is usually more expensive and for most it isn't necessary until you start getting a lot of traffic. Almost all ISP's provide an e-mail address. Some provide the browser. Providers will charge by the size of the space provided and the bandwidth. The size of the space refers to the amount of the server's storage you are allocated for your site. Even if you plan to build an extravagant site with numerous pages and lots of still graphics, 5 megabytes is plenty to start. If you want to do a lot of animation and audio, your space needs will swell. To give you an example, as I write this article, my site contains over 25 web pages, audio, graphics on every page, and over 75,000 words (that's about 250 pages typewritten and double spaced). All that information uses only about 1 megabyte on the server. Bandwidth is a different story. Bandwidth refers to the total amount of server space accessed by visitors to your page in a given period of time (usually monthly). Therefore, if you visit my site and hit every page once, your visit would be logged as 1 megabyte of bandwidth. However, if you just visited my home page and one article, the ISP would log only about 100 kilobytes. Thus, with each hit, you only get charged for what your visitors access, not the amount of the whole site. My ISP plan includes 300 megabytes of bandwidth per month. Since my average visitor hits my site for about 150K, I can sustain about 2000 hits per month without incurring a surcharge. Most providers will offer a flat rate that will include a certain amount of space and a certain amount of bandwidth plus e-mail services and browsing time. If you exceed your allocation in any category, they charge you extra for the usage. Plans run anywhere from $15.00 per month for basic packages, to many hundreds for commercial accounts. I suggest you start in the $15.00 to $50.00 per month range. You can always move up later. Building An Effective Site Once you have an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and an address (URL), you are ready to build your site. Your first decision is whether you want to build your own site, or have a designer build it for you. Having a designer build your site is a fast and painless way (unless you count the pain of paying the fee) to get your site up and running quickly. Designers can construct a slick page with all kinds of whistles and bells that will make you the envy of every kid on the block. Having said that, in starting out, I really don't think it makes a lot of sense to hire a designer. Paying a designer to build your web page is a little like paying someone to do your grocery shopping. You will be paying a lot more and you will usually be eating food that he/she likes instead of food that you like. Also, every time you get hungry, you have to pay him/her to go shopping again. If you want your web site to be effective, you will constantly need to be adding to it. That means the designer may have to move in with you. As I mentioned in a previous section, you are not going to get a lot of new clients from your web site at this stage in the internet's history. The only reason to have a site is to get familiar with the dynamics of the web so that when the concept really takes off, you are at the forefront rather than trying to catch up. Thus, if you are going to hire a designer to build a site, you may as well wait until it is more likely you will get a return on the investment. If you get in now, I strongly recommend you build it yourself. Perhaps, after you learn the basics and you want to build a really sophisticated page it would make sense to hire a designer, but at first I recommend everyone build their own basic page from scratch. Actually, it is far less difficult than you would imagine. I had a blast designing my page in the first month. I learned about HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language - don't worry it's easy) and 3D graphic design and finally audio. Now that the site is set up, I just write articles and insert them. Now, the home page designing software is so easy you don't even need to learn HTML. There are two types of software you will want to have before you begin. The first is an HTML editor. HTML is a simple set of commands that formats your web page and allows you to link and insert graphics. The editor inserts the commands for you (just point and click) and makes it very easy to design the page without having to memorize the commands. There are quite a few of these editors on the market and there are even a few on the web that you can download for free. Another tool you will need is a graphics generator. Some HTML editors include a graphics generator, but I found you have more versatility if you get software specifically designed for creating graphics. Designing Your Site The most important consideration in building your site is the content. There are many millions of web sites on the World Wide Web. You want your page to be interesting and provide value to the visitor so he/she will tell his/her friends. There are a number of ways to do this. One good way to draw visitors is to provide numerous links to other places that might interest the people who hit your page. When users are surfing the net, they will usually pick a topic from one of the search engines and follow it to a page, then link from that page to another, then another, etc. What makes surfing fun is to move from topic to topic within a category and find interesting pages serendipitously. If you provide a place where surfers can find a lot of interesting sites, they will come to your page frequently and tell their friends. An outstanding example of this is technology lawyer Jeff Kuester's site entitled Kuesterlaw. Jeff has created the consummate linking hub for technology lawyers and technology gurus looking for lawyers and resources. A second way to make your site valuable is to offer interesting information. My site is a good example of giving the visitor valuable information. Lawyers come here and get advice without having to pay my outrageous fee. They like that. Meanwhile, I am building name recognition and I have gotten numerous clients from all over the country who first heard about me right here. Likewise, publishing articles of interest to the profession will help me establish a reputation for competence in my field. If I can get lawyers to visit my site and they are impressed by my articles, I improve my credibility and stand a greater chance of getting lecture requests. As a lawyer, you can do the same thing. Articles of interest to the profession will improve your reputation and increase the probability you will get a referral. Remember, close to one third of all referrals lawyers get are from other lawyers. Another thing that makes your site attractive is what web junkies refer to as coolness. A cool site has animations, audio, video or strangeness that make it fun to visit. A page of lawyer jokes would be cool (it's not what you would expect from a lawyer). It may not be right, however, if you are trying to create an ultra professional image. Before you start building your site, think about how you want to lay it out. A good site is easy to use and follows logical linking patterns. You should have a home page (this is the page that pops up when visitors type in your URL address) and back pages (these are pages on your site to which you link from your home page). Before you start, think about the different sections you want to include. For instance, take a look at my home page. The home page includes my logo, a description of the site with stars that link you to other places on the home page or to the back pages (notice there are also text links to all the back pages). My back pages include, Lawyer Links, Practice Profile and Information About Lectures. In addition, each of the articles is a back page as well. All the back pages can be reached from a link on the home page and all the back pages have a link back to the home page. (This is very important because the visitor may access a back page on your site from a link on someone else's page. If he/she likes the page, he/she might want to see more of your site. Without this link, there is no easy way to get to your home page.) A few tips are worth mentioning. Don't overwhelm your pages with graphics. Graphics often take more time to load than the rest of the page. Too many large complicated graphics will take what seems like forever (especially on a 28.8 baud modem). Take special care with backgrounds. A bad combination of background colors or images may make the type unreadable. Always include text links to everywhere to which you have a graphic link. There are still people out there who prefer text links. When designing your page, design it for 640x480 pixels (this is a standard 14" or 15" monitor). If you have a 17" monitor, you may be using 800x600 or higher. If you design the page to look balanced and wonderful on your monitor, it will get scrambled when the browser tries to fit it into the smaller screen. You can check this by reformatting your screen to 640x480 and then opening the browser. Better still, while you are designing the page, stay in 640x480 mode. Another test you should make is to shrink the browser window from full size to various smaller window sizes and see what happens to your page. A good page will maintain its visual integrity when viewed at any size. The best way to get ideas for your site is to surf the web. Take a look at what other law firms are doing. If you like a technique, incorporate something similar into your page. If you like the way the page is set up and you don't know how to do it, take a look at the HTML code by pulling down the "View" menu on your browser and selecting "Document Source". You can learn a lot of tricks by imitating HTML commands from other pages. Using Your Site As A Newsletter Newsletters are a good way of keeping your name in front of clients and contacts to make sure they remember you when they are asked for a good lawyer. Newsletters are proven to increase client and contact referrals. The beauty of publishing your newsletter on the web is that the information you upload there will also be of interest to random surfers. The web can be an effective and inexpensive way to present your newsletter. There are no envelopes to stuff, paper to collate or address labels to print. You simply write your newsletter article and upload it to your web site. Keep an address book of e-mail addresses and copy everyone on your list with a short note telling them about each new article and how to access it. Also, since you can archive previous articles on your web site, clients can refer back to one if that issue suddenly becomes germane. This is an advantage over paper newsletters that are almost always discarded after they are reviewed. With each new article, you have made another impression on your clients and contacts. This increases the likelihood they will remember you at that critical moment when they are asked "Do you know a good lawyer who ..." Building Traffic To Your Site After you have built a killer web site, it would be nice if someone were to visit. Don't assume that just because you build it they will come. Your site will end up a moss covered billboard on a dirt road miles from the information highway. You have to let people know you are out there. You have to build traffic. The place to start is by adding your URL to the search engines. Search engines are services that index the web in various ways so people can look up information. There are dozens of engines. Start with Yahoo! This is a highly respected, much used engine that lists sites by category. The link I've given you above takes you directly to the law firm section. Another type of engine crawls web pages with "robots" and indexes the entire page to be used in word searches. A robot is nothing more than a program that automatically accesses web pages, reads them, indexes them and follows the links on the page to other pages where it does the same. Theoretically, if you wait long enough, the robots will find you, but with the size to which the web has grown that could take years. The best way for you to get listed quickly is to add your URL to their crawl list. When you visit the site of the search engine, you will usually see a link that says "Add URL". Simply select that link and follow the directions. Some of the most popular of these types of engines are: Alta Vista Excite HotBot Infoseek Ultra Open Text Webcrawler There are some tricks to getting your page noticed on the indexing services. You want your page to pop up as close to the top of the list as possible. Sometimes word searches will find thousands of pages. The closer you are to the top of the list the more likely the user will select your page. The most important priority for these engines is given to the words in the title of your page. Use words in the title that will be likely to be entered in the word search. "Divorce" is better than "Family Law", "Wills, Trusts & Estates" is better than "Estate Planning", " "Marketing" is better than "Business Development". Most of the engines take also take keywords from a META tag named "keywords". Open the HTML code for this page (the page you are currently reading) by using the "View" pulldown (on your menu bar at the top of your browser) and selecting "Document Source". You will notice right after the title there are lines that say: META NAME="description" CONTENT="This article teaches lawyers the basics of building traffic and getting noticed on the World Wide Web." META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="WWW marketing internet marketing attorney marketing lawyer marketing law office business development web consulting legal law firm solo practitioner sole practitioner attorney marketing consulting law office marketing" See what this looks like by doing this now. The META description is picked up by some of the engines and used in their description of your page. Others will just use the opening text of the page so make sure the opening text says something that describes the page and not something like "select this link for more information". The META keywords are picked up by the robots and given second priority in word searches (after the words in your title). You can see by my keywords, the words I think are most likely to be entered in a search. Create word combinations that will be used in phrases (like "WWW marketing" and "web consulting") because exact matches on phrases entered by users will move you up the list. Make sure your back pages use various high probability words in the title. An example would be using "Law Frim" in one title and "Law Office", "Legal Services", "Lawyers", "Attorneys" in other titles. This will increase the chances that one of your back pages will pop up near the top of the list when users enter different variations. If the user then links to one of your back pages, he/she can find his/her way to your home page with a link that you provide. When you add your URL to the robotic search engines, add the URL's of your back pages separately. In theory, the robot is supposed to follow all your links and find all your back pages, but I have found this doesn't really happen. The more pages you add to the crawl list, the more pages you will get listed and the more likely you are to get traffic. You are going to have to be patient in getting listed. The only ones I have found that gets you listed right away are Alta Vista (one day) and Infoseek Ultra (instantly). The rest say you will be crawled within a week or two, but in reality it is more like a month or two. If you don't get listed within six weeks, resubmit. I have found a good tool for adding your site to numerous search engines at the same time. It is called Add It! and it saves a lot of time in submitting sites. It will also submit to a bunch of search engines you haven't heard of before. Look around for legal resources that link to lawyer sites. Offer to include them on your links page and request they link back. Most web site managers know that links build traffic and are more than willing to trade links. This is the very best way to build traffic because your audience is targeted. There are a number of these types of sites on my Legal Links page. Conclusion Building a web site can be a fun adventure that opens up the secrets of commerce in the 21st century. Take time to learn HTML and continue to improve your page. Surf the web often looking for new ideas and new places to trade links. Before too long the web will start paying off for pioneers like you and me. Copyright © Art Italo, 1996, 1999. All Rights Reserved Links are provided for the convenience and interest of users attending this site. Italo Consulting® claims no association with any linked entity unless so stated by that entity. Italo Consulting® will remove any link from this website upon request from the owner. Alta Vista is Copyright ©1996 Digital Equipment Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Excite is Copyright ©1996 Excite Inc. All Rights Reserved. HotBot is Copyright ©1996 INKT0MI CORPORATION. All Rights Reserved. Infoseek Ultra is Copyright ©1995-96 Infoseek Corporation. All rights reserved. Mindspring is Copyright ©1996 by Mindspring Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved Open Text is Copyright ©1996 Open Text Corporation. All Rights Reserved. THE LIST is Copyright ©1996 by Mecklermedia. All Rights Reserved. Webcrawler is Copyright ©1996 America Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Yahoo! is Copyright ©1994-96 Yahoo! All Rights Reserved. The author thanks the following sites for giving their permission to be mentioned in the article: Kuesterlaw Add It! The Seamless Website Art Italo is a consultant working exclusively with attorneys in the areas of business development and strategic planning. He speaks internationally on legal marketing and strategic planning. He has developed and refined the concept of Leveraged Networking after over 5000 hours of individual consultations with attorneys. He personally consults for over 150 attorneys in Atlanta with practices ranging from solo practitioners to partners with major firms. Art has a total of 21 years of marketing and management experience and holds an A.B. from Brown University and an M.B.A. from Pace University. For on-line help with your marketing questions, e-mail Art Italo at italco@mindspring.com or contact Art Italo at: Italo Consulting® P.O. Box 1716 Kennesaw, GA 30144 (770) 975-7586 For more articles, return to the Italo Consulting® Home Page You are visitor # Thanks for coming! Counter provided by
When I first decided to create my own home page in June of 1996, I was starting from ground zero on the web. I had never even browsed the web prior to that. Since then, I have built my own page from scratch. Most everything I learned, I learned by browsing the web (there is a wealth of information on EVERYTHING including building your own home page). As I write this (about three months later) my page has grown to over 20 articles with graphics, audio, and numerous links from search engines and other legal web sites. At the beginning of the third month of the site's existence, I installed a counter. During that month I recorded over 800 hits. Since then the number of hits has just kept increasing.
I tell you this, not to convince you how wonderful I am, but to demonstrate to you that building a successful home page is not all that difficult or daunting. Like anything else, there are some conventions to learn, some new words to master, and some tactics that have a high probability of getting results. If you were smart and persistent enough to make it through law school and pass the bar, this will be a piece of cake.
This article attacks the World Wide Web from the ground up. To avoid boring those of you who already have a web page or have reached a certain level of sophistication, I have outlined the topics below with links to the parts of the article that might interest you. If you prefer, you can just scroll down to find the parts you want.
That being said, there is a caveat. At this stage in the Web's development, you are not likely to generate much new business from your web page. Your monetary return on invested time will probably be low. There are a number of reasons for this.
Though the penetration of the personal computer is fairly high and climbing, and almost all new computers now come equipped with an internet browser, the real penetration of the web into everyday life is as yet negligible. A great number of people have access to the internet, but the number of people who use it regularly and think of it as a commercial resource is still very small.
Worldwide access to information is very exciting, but the great majority of law practices are locally based. When looking for a lawyer, the internet is not going to cross most people's minds as a way to find one. They are still much more likely to ask a friend or pick up the phone book.
So, if there is no money in it, why do it? Because I'm betting there is going to be a pile of money in it in the not too distant future. Many of the things you need to do business over the net are being developed. Live Audio and Video are already a reality. Two way conversation, now limited to typing e-mail messages and online chats, will soon progress to audiovisual images between users. E-mail capabilities will be expanded to where you will be able to send audio and video messages through the net.
One of the big impediments to doing business on the internet is the lack of ability to do secure money transactions. Giving your credit card number is always a risky adventure in today's internet environment. Before long, however, a system of cybercash will be developed where transactions will be made without credit cards and money can be e-mailed to someone's account.
Another drag on internet commerce is the slowness of the system. People don't like to wait for pages to load, and this discourages them from browsing the web. Right now, cable companies and telephone companies are in a race to make the web bigger, better, faster and more accessible. This will induce more of your prospective clients to come online and it will increase your chances of getting business.
So why jump in now? Why not wait? The reason is the learning curve. If you become a web aficionado now, when things are relatively simple, you will be able to learn about the new technologies bit by bit as they develop. This gives you an edge over people who try to jump in when it is more fully developed and complex.
Finding An Internet Service Provider Your first step in building a web site is finding an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The chances are you are not going to want to set up your own server (this is very expensive). You are going to want to house your site on someone else's server. Essentially, you will be renting space on the ISP's computer. Thus, when someone hits your web site, they are actually reading your material while visiting this remote server.
Finding an ISP is pretty easy. There are numerous providers around the world. I use MindSpring, which is a fast growing national provider. One ISP you might want to check out if you are a lawyer is The Seamless Website. This is an ISP that focuses on the legal profession. In addition to hosting your site, they provide design services and consulting to help you get started.
Most ISP's provide an account which includes an address for your site called an URL (Uniform Resource Locator). This is how people find you on the net. Some providers can provide you with a virtual domain name. This means the provider's name is not included in your URL. To the outside world it looks like you have your own server. This is usually more expensive and for most it isn't necessary until you start getting a lot of traffic. Almost all ISP's provide an e-mail address. Some provide the browser. Providers will charge by the size of the space provided and the bandwidth. The size of the space refers to the amount of the server's storage you are allocated for your site. Even if you plan to build an extravagant site with numerous pages and lots of still graphics, 5 megabytes is plenty to start. If you want to do a lot of animation and audio, your space needs will swell. To give you an example, as I write this article, my site contains over 25 web pages, audio, graphics on every page, and over 75,000 words (that's about 250 pages typewritten and double spaced). All that information uses only about 1 megabyte on the server.
Bandwidth is a different story. Bandwidth refers to the total amount of server space accessed by visitors to your page in a given period of time (usually monthly). Therefore, if you visit my site and hit every page once, your visit would be logged as 1 megabyte of bandwidth. However, if you just visited my home page and one article, the ISP would log only about 100 kilobytes. Thus, with each hit, you only get charged for what your visitors access, not the amount of the whole site. My ISP plan includes 300 megabytes of bandwidth per month. Since my average visitor hits my site for about 150K, I can sustain about 2000 hits per month without incurring a surcharge.
Most providers will offer a flat rate that will include a certain amount of space and a certain amount of bandwidth plus e-mail services and browsing time. If you exceed your allocation in any category, they charge you extra for the usage. Plans run anywhere from $15.00 per month for basic packages, to many hundreds for commercial accounts. I suggest you start in the $15.00 to $50.00 per month range. You can always move up later.
Building An Effective Site Once you have an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and an address (URL), you are ready to build your site. Your first decision is whether you want to build your own site, or have a designer build it for you.
Having a designer build your site is a fast and painless way (unless you count the pain of paying the fee) to get your site up and running quickly. Designers can construct a slick page with all kinds of whistles and bells that will make you the envy of every kid on the block. Having said that, in starting out, I really don't think it makes a lot of sense to hire a designer.
Paying a designer to build your web page is a little like paying someone to do your grocery shopping. You will be paying a lot more and you will usually be eating food that he/she likes instead of food that you like. Also, every time you get hungry, you have to pay him/her to go shopping again. If you want your web site to be effective, you will constantly need to be adding to it. That means the designer may have to move in with you.
As I mentioned in a previous section, you are not going to get a lot of new clients from your web site at this stage in the internet's history. The only reason to have a site is to get familiar with the dynamics of the web so that when the concept really takes off, you are at the forefront rather than trying to catch up. Thus, if you are going to hire a designer to build a site, you may as well wait until it is more likely you will get a return on the investment. If you get in now, I strongly recommend you build it yourself. Perhaps, after you learn the basics and you want to build a really sophisticated page it would make sense to hire a designer, but at first I recommend everyone build their own basic page from scratch.
Actually, it is far less difficult than you would imagine. I had a blast designing my page in the first month. I learned about HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language - don't worry it's easy) and 3D graphic design and finally audio. Now that the site is set up, I just write articles and insert them. Now, the home page designing software is so easy you don't even need to learn HTML.
There are two types of software you will want to have before you begin. The first is an HTML editor. HTML is a simple set of commands that formats your web page and allows you to link and insert graphics. The editor inserts the commands for you (just point and click) and makes it very easy to design the page without having to memorize the commands. There are quite a few of these editors on the market and there are even a few on the web that you can download for free.
Another tool you will need is a graphics generator. Some HTML editors include a graphics generator, but I found you have more versatility if you get software specifically designed for creating graphics.
Designing Your Site The most important consideration in building your site is the content. There are many millions of web sites on the World Wide Web. You want your page to be interesting and provide value to the visitor so he/she will tell his/her friends. There are a number of ways to do this.
One good way to draw visitors is to provide numerous links to other places that might interest the people who hit your page. When users are surfing the net, they will usually pick a topic from one of the search engines and follow it to a page, then link from that page to another, then another, etc. What makes surfing fun is to move from topic to topic within a category and find interesting pages serendipitously. If you provide a place where surfers can find a lot of interesting sites, they will come to your page frequently and tell their friends. An outstanding example of this is technology lawyer Jeff Kuester's site entitled Kuesterlaw. Jeff has created the consummate linking hub for technology lawyers and technology gurus looking for lawyers and resources.
A second way to make your site valuable is to offer interesting information. My site is a good example of giving the visitor valuable information. Lawyers come here and get advice without having to pay my outrageous fee. They like that. Meanwhile, I am building name recognition and I have gotten numerous clients from all over the country who first heard about me right here. Likewise, publishing articles of interest to the profession will help me establish a reputation for competence in my field. If I can get lawyers to visit my site and they are impressed by my articles, I improve my credibility and stand a greater chance of getting lecture requests. As a lawyer, you can do the same thing. Articles of interest to the profession will improve your reputation and increase the probability you will get a referral. Remember, close to one third of all referrals lawyers get are from other lawyers.
Another thing that makes your site attractive is what web junkies refer to as coolness. A cool site has animations, audio, video or strangeness that make it fun to visit. A page of lawyer jokes would be cool (it's not what you would expect from a lawyer). It may not be right, however, if you are trying to create an ultra professional image.
Before you start building your site, think about how you want to lay it out. A good site is easy to use and follows logical linking patterns. You should have a home page (this is the page that pops up when visitors type in your URL address) and back pages (these are pages on your site to which you link from your home page). Before you start, think about the different sections you want to include. For instance, take a look at my home page.
The home page includes my logo, a description of the site with stars that link you to other places on the home page or to the back pages (notice there are also text links to all the back pages). My back pages include, Lawyer Links, Practice Profile and Information About Lectures. In addition, each of the articles is a back page as well. All the back pages can be reached from a link on the home page and all the back pages have a link back to the home page. (This is very important because the visitor may access a back page on your site from a link on someone else's page. If he/she likes the page, he/she might want to see more of your site. Without this link, there is no easy way to get to your home page.)
A few tips are worth mentioning. Don't overwhelm your pages with graphics. Graphics often take more time to load than the rest of the page. Too many large complicated graphics will take what seems like forever (especially on a 28.8 baud modem). Take special care with backgrounds. A bad combination of background colors or images may make the type unreadable.
Always include text links to everywhere to which you have a graphic link. There are still people out there who prefer text links.
When designing your page, design it for 640x480 pixels (this is a standard 14" or 15" monitor). If you have a 17" monitor, you may be using 800x600 or higher. If you design the page to look balanced and wonderful on your monitor, it will get scrambled when the browser tries to fit it into the smaller screen. You can check this by reformatting your screen to 640x480 and then opening the browser. Better still, while you are designing the page, stay in 640x480 mode. Another test you should make is to shrink the browser window from full size to various smaller window sizes and see what happens to your page. A good page will maintain its visual integrity when viewed at any size.
The best way to get ideas for your site is to surf the web. Take a look at what other law firms are doing. If you like a technique, incorporate something similar into your page. If you like the way the page is set up and you don't know how to do it, take a look at the HTML code by pulling down the "View" menu on your browser and selecting "Document Source". You can learn a lot of tricks by imitating HTML commands from other pages.
Using Your Site As A Newsletter Newsletters are a good way of keeping your name in front of clients and contacts to make sure they remember you when they are asked for a good lawyer. Newsletters are proven to increase client and contact referrals. The beauty of publishing your newsletter on the web is that the information you upload there will also be of interest to random surfers. The web can be an effective and inexpensive way to present your newsletter. There are no envelopes to stuff, paper to collate or address labels to print. You simply write your newsletter article and upload it to your web site.
Keep an address book of e-mail addresses and copy everyone on your list with a short note telling them about each new article and how to access it. Also, since you can archive previous articles on your web site, clients can refer back to one if that issue suddenly becomes germane. This is an advantage over paper newsletters that are almost always discarded after they are reviewed.
With each new article, you have made another impression on your clients and contacts. This increases the likelihood they will remember you at that critical moment when they are asked "Do you know a good lawyer who ..."
Building Traffic To Your Site After you have built a killer web site, it would be nice if someone were to visit. Don't assume that just because you build it they will come. Your site will end up a moss covered billboard on a dirt road miles from the information highway. You have to let people know you are out there. You have to build traffic.
The place to start is by adding your URL to the search engines. Search engines are services that index the web in various ways so people can look up information. There are dozens of engines. Start with Yahoo! This is a highly respected, much used engine that lists sites by category. The link I've given you above takes you directly to the law firm section.
Another type of engine crawls web pages with "robots" and indexes the entire page to be used in word searches. A robot is nothing more than a program that automatically accesses web pages, reads them, indexes them and follows the links on the page to other pages where it does the same. Theoretically, if you wait long enough, the robots will find you, but with the size to which the web has grown that could take years. The best way for you to get listed quickly is to add your URL to their crawl list. When you visit the site of the search engine, you will usually see a link that says "Add URL". Simply select that link and follow the directions. Some of the most popular of these types of engines are:
The most important priority for these engines is given to the words in the title of your page. Use words in the title that will be likely to be entered in the word search. "Divorce" is better than "Family Law", "Wills, Trusts & Estates" is better than "Estate Planning", " "Marketing" is better than "Business Development".
Most of the engines take also take keywords from a META tag named "keywords".
Open the HTML code for this page (the page you are currently reading) by using the "View" pulldown (on your menu bar at the top of your browser) and selecting "Document Source". You will notice right after the title there are lines that say:
The META description is picked up by some of the engines and used in their description of your page. Others will just use the opening text of the page so make sure the opening text says something that describes the page and not something like "select this link for more information".
The META keywords are picked up by the robots and given second priority in word searches (after the words in your title). You can see by my keywords, the words I think are most likely to be entered in a search. Create word combinations that will be used in phrases (like "WWW marketing" and "web consulting") because exact matches on phrases entered by users will move you up the list.
Make sure your back pages use various high probability words in the title. An example would be using "Law Frim" in one title and "Law Office", "Legal Services", "Lawyers", "Attorneys" in other titles. This will increase the chances that one of your back pages will pop up near the top of the list when users enter different variations. If the user then links to one of your back pages, he/she can find his/her way to your home page with a link that you provide.
When you add your URL to the robotic search engines, add the URL's of your back pages separately. In theory, the robot is supposed to follow all your links and find all your back pages, but I have found this doesn't really happen. The more pages you add to the crawl list, the more pages you will get listed and the more likely you are to get traffic.
You are going to have to be patient in getting listed. The only ones I have found that gets you listed right away are Alta Vista (one day) and Infoseek Ultra (instantly). The rest say you will be crawled within a week or two, but in reality it is more like a month or two. If you don't get listed within six weeks, resubmit.
I have found a good tool for adding your site to numerous search engines at the same time. It is called Add It! and it saves a lot of time in submitting sites. It will also submit to a bunch of search engines you haven't heard of before.
Look around for legal resources that link to lawyer sites. Offer to include them on your links page and request they link back. Most web site managers know that links build traffic and are more than willing to trade links. This is the very best way to build traffic because your audience is targeted. There are a number of these types of sites on my Legal Links page.
Copyright © Art Italo, 1996, 1999. All Rights Reserved
Alta Vista is Copyright ©1996 Digital Equipment Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Excite is Copyright ©1996 Excite Inc. All Rights Reserved. HotBot is Copyright ©1996 INKT0MI CORPORATION. All Rights Reserved. Infoseek Ultra is Copyright ©1995-96 Infoseek Corporation. All rights reserved. Mindspring is Copyright ©1996 by Mindspring Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved Open Text is Copyright ©1996 Open Text Corporation. All Rights Reserved. THE LIST is Copyright ©1996 by Mecklermedia. All Rights Reserved. Webcrawler is Copyright ©1996 America Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Yahoo! is Copyright ©1994-96 Yahoo! All Rights Reserved.
The author thanks the following sites for giving their permission to be mentioned in the article:
Kuesterlaw Add It! The Seamless Website
He has developed and refined the concept of Leveraged Networking after over 5000 hours of individual consultations with attorneys. He personally consults for over 150 attorneys in Atlanta with practices ranging from solo practitioners to partners with major firms. Art has a total of 21 years of marketing and management experience and holds an A.B. from Brown University and an M.B.A. from Pace University.
For on-line help with your marketing questions, e-mail Art Italo at italco@mindspring.com or contact Art Italo at:
Italo Consulting® P.O. Box 1716 Kennesaw, GA 30144
(770) 975-7586
For more articles, return to the Italo Consulting® Home Page
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