Why You Need Help

Posted on April 26, 2011 by adminlaw

It’s ok to ask for help. We teach our children to do it. If you don’t know how to do something, ask for help. Pretty simple really, yet when it comes to things like websites, and social media, many people are hesitant.

There are different reasons. One sometimes is that all this stuff, you can essentially do yourself. If you know how, you can design your own logo, define your own brand, build your own website, perform your own social media work… None of this stuff requires thousands of dollars to do. It just requires expertise to do it well, and that expertise is what usually costs money, or time.

Think of it like cooking and food. A chef can go to the grocery store, buy $20 or less worth of food, and cook a mouth watering meal in less than an hour. Something astounding, depending on the chef, and something that took minutes to do, with very little in the way of tools. But that meal is the result of years of training, knowledge, and ability.

Your website is the same as that meal. The question is only “How good is that meal going to be?” if the person making it has no training?

Then there are the cookie cuttter solutions. Template solutions. One size fits all, just in slightly different looking packaging. You can go buy a frozen dinner, bring it home, throw it in the microwave, and voila…. Dinner. Certainly it’s an option, and it’s a better one (usually) than starving that night, but what if you’re trying to impress someone? What if you’re cooking for a date? Someone you want to impress and come back to see you again. Do you throw a couple microwaved dinners on the table, still in their convenient packaging and serving trays?

It’s ok if you don’t know how to build websites, or do your social media. It’s ok to ask someone for help. It’s ok to say “I don’t want one of those frozen dinner template websites.” because you want your “meal” to be better, different, even impressive, and so good that your date will come back for more.

We’re a segmented society, one where different people have expertise in different things, and ours is in websites for law firms, as well as internet marketing and social media for lawyes. Ask us for help and we can not only help your logo, your branding, your website, help you develop your social media strategy, as well as implement it, and be a partner there helping you in our proverbial kitchen to cook that website into something fantastic, rather than just settling for the frozen dinner version of a law firm website.

Ask an expert to help you. Ask US to help you. You won’t regret it.

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Web Designers – The Mechanics of the 21st Century

Posted on April 21, 2011 by adminlaw

Mechanics routinely are listed as one of the least trusted professions, behind Used Car Salesmen and Politicians. Pretty soon, unless there is a sea change in how the industry does it’s business we’ll be able to put Web Designers up there with Mechanics.

I’ve personally got a good mechanic, who I trust with my car. I trust him when he says what needs to be fixed, and why, and how much it costs. He also talks my ear off and not only explains the sometimes intricate reasons for a certain repair, even showing me the parts involved, but then chats about what he’s doing the coming weekend. It’s great. He knows me, he knows my wife, he knows our car, and I trust him to not rip me off, but also back up his repairs if something goes wrong. I’m also well aware that this type of relationship is an aberration.

Well the 21st century companion to the mechanic is the Web Designer. People don’t trust them for numerous reasons. They see them charge an exorbitant amount of money at times and don’t understand why. They are told they need to do certain things and don’t understand why. Then when they “drive” their website off the lot and something breaks (like they need to fix something on an attorney profile page or change a staff picture) then it’s straight back into the shop and get charged some more on top of the thousands and thousands they already spent. Or the Web Designer is just gone, or won’t return their calls.

Most law firm partners I talk to, have had at least one bad experience with the person who did a prior website for their business.

We don’t want to be that way. We want to make customer service and trust number one, no matter how cheesy that sounds. We want to build relationships with our customers. We don’t want them to just sign up anonymously, never talk to someone, and then bam there is a website they don’t like. We also don’t want to waste their time with pretend airs and schmoozing and then abandon them after we have their final check. We want to build a relationship over time, one where each and every one of our customers has a customer representative that they like and trust.

With oLawOffice you get a Customer Representative to be your point of contact, someone familiar with your law firm, with you and your business, and someone you can build a relationship with, so that when you need something done on your website you don’t feel like you’re asking some random stranger, or worse an anonymous form on a website, for help.

Are we perfect? No. We make mistakes. We’ll admit to them if you find them, and help you have the best website for your law firm as possible, because your success is our success. Our goal is to be your partner in making you have the most successful website and internet presence you can possibly have for your law firm.

And maybe even chat about what your plans are for the weekend.

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Five Things You Can Do To Make Your Website Better

Posted on April 12, 2011 by adminlaw

Rather than list out reasons most law firm websites are terrible, I’m going to be more proactive and offer some solutions…

1. Post your hours. People want to know when you’re open, don’t hide it. Either have your hours on your front page, or have a clearly marked navigation link that says “Hours” or “Hours of Operation”. Don’t get cute and call it something else (They call that “mystery meat” navigation… where you’re not sure what the navigation actually does. Also they don’t like it when you post hours you’re open that are inaccurate. Nothing pisses off someone more than looking up information on your website and seeing “Open till 11pm on Tuesdays” and then showing up at your place at 10pm and you’re closed.

2. Accurate Contact Information. You need a phone number in text (it lets people on a phone press your number to call you right from your website) and not an image or in Flash, preferably on the front page of your website, but definitely on a Contact page. You need an email address listed that matches your domain name, not your home Verizon or Comcast email account. You also need to actually RESPOND to that email address. You can have a contact form as well, but you need to make contacting you directly an easy option for people if they want it, and you need to actually respond to these contacts.  Adding a vcard download is a nice touch.  ”vcard”  is a file format standard for electronic business cards.

3. Accurate Location Information. List your address in html. Embed a Google Map onto your contact page. Maybe combine it with the contact page, that’s fine. But don’t hide your address. Don’t assume people know where you are. Also don’t list out “if you are coming from the north….” directions that list out turn by turns. People hate those. Just put up the Google Map and if people need directions Google Map can give them. If you have any specifics though like “Our parking lot is behind the building, be sure to turn on 12th or 13th streets and then enter our parking lot from behind the building on Gordon Avenue” and add an additional map if it’s a trick that might not be obvious.

4. List your attorneys with a picture. People are generally nervous enough when meeting an attorney, put a picture to the name.  It doesn’t matter if your client is setting up a trust or fighting a DUI.  Being able to quickly put a name to face makes your first client interaction that much more likely to go well.

5. Protect yourself and stop unwanted calls On the top of every page or on the home page at least you need to say “This site is an advertisement for legal services in INSERT THE STATES YOU PRACTICE, but not in any other state(s)

The main reason people come to your website is for information. Don’t drive them away with bad photography or auto play videos, and be sure to present them with the information they want to find in a manner that helps them find it, and make sure it’s accurate. If you do that then your website will be better off. Oh it might still be bad, and you might need help making it look like baboons didn’t make it…. But no matter how ugly it looks, or how little you’re doing to drive business using online technologies if you at least get the information your customers want into their hands, you’re doing something right.

If you have no idea how to make this happen, and want help realizing the vision of a law firm website that is professional, then drop us a line, or try a free 14 test spin of a customized website made just for your law firm .

 

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It’s Better to Look Good…

Posted on April 8, 2011 by adminlaw

We talk often about more of the functional things that law firms do wrong on their websites. Bad PDF Brochures, auto play videos , impossible navigation, Flash sites that don’t work on our phones, and more. Far more.

But even if you do everything right, there still is more to do to get to that next level, and one of the main things is design.

You need your law firm site to look professional, it needs to take your brand, or logo, or even just your interior to the web in a way that not only matches your brand but looks good too. One thing we’ve always told people is that you need your website to look “one level” higher than you are for people to give you the appropriate respect. For instance if you are a one man one location law office, your website needs to look like a local firm with 5 attorneys. If you are a small firm with 10 attorneys, you need to look like a regional firm with 30 attorneys over 3 states. If you’re a national firm, you need to look global.

What does that mean though? Well obviously if you only have one location you can’t lie and say you have more, it’s not about the locations, it’s about the presentation, it’s about the design. You can’t look like you had your cousin build your website. You can’t use some generic $5 or $50 template that gets all the nitty gritty right but lacks any soul of your firm.

Do you paint your walls? Do you hang up art or interesting items? Do you have plants, skylights, wooden highlights or crown molding? Do you have your attorneys wear a suits? Do you have anything that makes your law firm feel like it isn’t some generic office? Well if you do, the same should be on your website. It shouldn’t feel stale or old or detached from any style your office has.

oLawOffice provides designs for you. We look at your logo, your brochures, your firm, any pictures you have, and we customize your site to match your firm with high quality textured backgrounds and touches to your website which immediately give it a look and feel and design that is appropriate and specific to your website. We don’t reinvent the wheel over and over, because people HATE that. They expect certain things in certain places, and while we give you some options of structures of the site, our goal is to mesh an efficient and highly effective website with one that has high quality design and looks good and matches your law firm.

Goar Law Concord MAIf you don’t, and you have some boring, or worse yet, broken site, people are going to associate your firm and service with the same slapdash quality. If you want people to think though that your firm  cares about the quality of your service, then you should give your website it’s design due as well.

If you are interested in seeing what we can do for you, contact us and try a free no commitment 14 day trial of a website customized for you.

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How To Make Your Own Website

Posted on April 7, 2011 by adminlaw

There’s an old story my business partners tells way too much…I actually saw a variation of it on a TV show the other night, wish I could remember what show it was.

An elderly Picasso was sitting in a cafe when a young man came up to him and asked him for a drawing on a napkin. Picasso happily agreed, drew a picture on a napkin and handed it to the man, “That will be one million dollars.” The man was aghast “One million dollars? But that took you 1 minute to draw!” To which Picasso replied “Ah yes, but it took me a lifetime to learn how to draw it.”

It’s the same thing with websites, or anything really. You pay for expertise, not action, and you get what you pay for. It used to be that you’d pay for tools too. Car Mechanics for instance have invested in a set of tools you don’t even have. Yet for the Web and Websites, all the tools are there, and they’re pretty much free. If you don’t want someone else to share their experience with you, you can do it yourself. Just like someone can defend themselves in court, rather than go to an attorney.

So what can you do to make a website by yourself for your law firm without paying anyone else a dime, including us?

1. Get a domain name. Go to godaddy.com (or any other domain name registrar) and find a domain name for your law firm . Be sure to follow good usability measures in picking one, but other than finding a good domain name that works for your law firm both matching your law firm name and SEO practices as well as usability all you need do is purchase it. Prices vary but figure 10 bucks a year. You can’t get around this cost.

2. Get a web host. I’m not going to call out a specific company here but you can go on the cheap and get a company for less than $10 a month, if you dig under $5 a month. Of course every host isn’t the same. Some serve your websites so slow that your customers will leave your website and never visit your law firm, others crash constantly. Others your website gets hacked and you have nobody to call to log back on and you have to fix it yourself. Premium hosting of course costs more. But if you want to go on the cheap and pick a $5 host, you’ll get what you pay for. Be sure it gives you access to PHP and MySQL or mentions that you can install a WordPress blog there.

3. Point your domain to your new host. You’ll need to log into Godaddy.com and then adjust the DNS settings on your domain to point to your new host.

4. If you want to have email with your domain name you’ll want to set that up as well. We recommend using Google Apps. Good email hosting for free, plus you get shared calendars, and webmail separate from your web host. It’s a good idea to have your email on a different server from your website. So sign up for Google Apps, and then set up the MX Records in Godaddy.com as well to point there, and then configure your Google Apps settings for your email, and get it set up.

5. Download WordPress and install it on your new hosting environment. Once you sign up for your web host you’ll get some log in information. You’ll need to FTP up to it (you’ll need an FTP program if you don’t have one yet) and move the WordPress installation files up to it.  Once they’re there you’ll also need to set up a database on your web host, and then run the installation files for WordPress.

6. Find a theme you like for WordPress. There are tons of free ones. If you’re lucky you’ll find one that matches your law firm logo and brand enough to not throw people off. If you’re in doubt go simpler rather than more complicated. Once you find one install it into your WordPress installation.

7. Customize your theme (optional). If you don’t like any of them and want to make your own theme to match your law firm  brand, or your own ideas then you’ll need to download a few more programs. Download Gimp. It’s like Adobe Photoshop but it’s free instead of costing thousands of dollars. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that Photoshop does but you’ll be able to make a design in it and then crop and save images. Then you can actually create a new theme almost entirely in WordPress. First find a basic theme that you like the structure of, and make a child theme of it in WordPress. Then within WordPress itself you can edit all the files of that theme to change the structure of the page, and change the styles and make it look however you want. If you want you can also edit the pages in a text editor on your computer and FTP them up to the web host. You’ll need to know HTML, PHP, and specifics about WordPress themeing for this, but tutorial information for all that is available online to learn how to mark up HTML and code in PHP, as well as the specifics of WordPress themeing.

8. Enter your information. Lastly be sure to set up the information on your site, probably you’ll want to create a front page template to be just your front page, so the front page isn’t a blog roll, and lists out the pertinent information about your law firm in a attractive but informative way. Create other pages and put your information on them, enter your practice areas, location(s), get an embedded google map, etc. Download some plugins to help out your ongoing things like submitting sitemaps to Google and Bing, as well as any social sharing helpers like ShareThis.

And voila. You’ve made the site yourself.

Of course from my experience most people will have read item 1 and gone “uh what?”. Which is fine. You’re an expert in things people pay money for, and so are we.

We’re here to do ALL that for you, and more. To provide top quality designs for your law firm customized for you rather than generic templates, to set up all this, plus your services and bio pages  and more. Even to be there and help you on an ongoing monthly, weekly, or even daily basis with your internet and email marketing, your LinkedIn accounts, anything you have going on your site. To provide guidance for you on anything involving the web with your business, and help making it a reality. Because you don’t have time to figure all that above out for yourself generally. it’s worth it for you to have an expert in your back pocket taking care of your website and online presence for you, so you can focus on other things that you ARE an expert in.

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