Feature

posted 17 Apr 2001 in Volume 4 Issue 1

Time for a new website?

Whether you are planning your firm’s first website or you have an established site and are considering moving from a traditional “brochure ware” site to a full e-commerce site you are entering a process fraught with risks. In this article Richard Martin and Mark Smith of Morgan Cole look at some of those risks and how to minimise them.

Where do you start?

First and foremost you must establish what the website is for. What are you hoping to achieve? Are you embarking on your first website because everyone else has one? Maybe this first site is little more than a brochure - it tells people about you what the firm does and provides another means of getting in contact (email). There’s nothing wrong with this. A basic website can be a relatively cheap simple way to get started with the internet but you must do it properly and be aware of the risks. Are you moving on from that initial ‘brochure ware’ website to a transactional site that allows you to interact with clients to conduct business and to generate revenue? Again at an early stage you should ask “what is the big idea?” Is it a different way of delivering a traditional service? For example are you going to provide a means for people to subscribe to newsletters and have them delivered by email rather than in the post? Are you going to provide on-line conveyancing or a will writing service? Will the new website be a tool for enhancing the relationship you have with existing clients? Will it provide an extranet service perhaps allowing clients to review matters or even initiate new matters on line? Will you be providing a totally new service an extension to the work you have traditionally undertaken? Is anyone else already doing it? How will you do it differently? Is there a market for it? Maybe the idea is not new but that doesn’t mean to say that there isn’t room in the market for another player especially if you can deliver the service differently to those existing providers. On the other hand if no one is already doing it you must ask yourselves why.

Project strategy

It should becoming clear by now that a new website isn’t an IT project or a marketing project. It’s a business project. Whether you are contemplating your first brochure ware website or you are proposing a full transactional website you must treat it like any other business project. You must have clear goals understand what you expect to achieve from the project and have measurable outcomes that allow you to gauge success or failure. Both your IT and marketing teams will have a role to play in the project but they are not the project leaders the project owners or the project champions. We haven’t dealt with project management in this article but this is an area that will be key to the success of the project.

Website design and build

How much are you going to spend on your new website? Will it be a “DIY” site? For example perhaps one of the partners has a son or daughter doing an ‘A’ Level in computing or maybe your own IT department has the skills to develop the website.

The nature of the site you are proposing and the resources available will largely determine which course you take. It is likely that for anything but the most basic site you will engage a professional agency to design and build the site. It is usual although by no means compulsory to use the same agency to carry out both the design and build work. If you already use an agency to develop your corporate brand it may be that you want to involve them in the design of your new website but they don’t have the skills to build the site.

The project could cost anything from a few thousand pounds to millions of pounds for a complex transactional site. It is all too easy to sit down with representatives from an agency and get carried away with their enthusiasm and ideas. A well-drafted website development agreement is critical to determine the scope and cost of the project.

If you were buying new premises for you business you would use a professional surveyor to inspect the premises and would take great care in drawing up the lease. Think of your website as your shop front to the world and ensure that it receives the same attention to detail that your prestigious new premises would.

Website design

The design should describe all the pages that make up the site and show how the user navigates between them. It may be a relatively simple site consisting of a collection of static linked html pages or it may be a dynamic site each page being generated by scripts as the user navigates by drawing data from a database. Whatever the case the design should clearly explain what happens when the user enters the page and when they leave it and how the user navigates between pages. All the “rules” of good ergonomic and stylish design will be followed. The user should never be more than two clicks away from the most often used features on your site should never come across combinations of colour that make them feel queasy nor should they wait for what seems likes ages while a clever graphic dances its way across the screen or lots of pictures download. But there is more to it than this. If you took away the logo from some of the legal websites you have visited as part of the research for the project would you be able to tell one from another? Your firm is different to any other law firm - you may do similar business to many other firms but do you do it in the same way? Why do clients come to you as opposed to anyone else? Your website must convey the difference between you and your competitors your culture and what it is like to do business with you.

Attracting visitors

The specification should show what features the design will include to attract visitors to the site. It will indicate how the designers can help to ensure that people using a search engine such as Yahoo! or Google will find your site near the top of the hit list. Typically this will include the use of metatags or keywords on the site and the regular submissions of these to web search engines. Your designers should understand your business and discuss with you a list of keywords that might come to mind when some one is looking for a law firm doing the type of work that your firm does.

Repeat visits

What will change on your site? Why should anyone ever visit it again? This is an important element of the design. If you want your site to be anything other than a web-based brochure then it must contain a large amount of up-to-date material that people will want to come back to. You need to consider your internal resources to make sure you are in a position to generate this content for the website.

Statistical analysis of visitors

Your specification must say what information will be provided about visitors to your site. At the very least you will want to know how many people are visiting the site and which pages they are looking at. You may also want to know how long they are spending on the site and what web browser they are using. What information can be provided about where they originated? Your designer should discuss all of these with you and show what information they can provide how frequently and in what format it will be provided.

IPR ownership

Your website design agreement should clearly deal with the intellectual property rights in the website. In addition to the copyright in the website there may well be material or tools used on the site that neither you nor the designers own. For example the site might incorporate a facility for visitors to search the site. This facility could be provided using a piece of third party software. The agreement must deal with all necessary third party licence issues.

Technical specification

Which web browsers should your site support? Is it an extranet site for existing clients? If you know they all use Internet Explorer then are you worried about whether it will work with Netscape Navigator? Do you expect the site to be viewed only from a PC or are there elements that should be available from a WAP phone? Should visitors to the site be expected to download plug-ins such as Adobe Acrobat Reader or Macromedia Flash to get the full benefit of your site? How secure does the website need to be? All of these factors need to be considered and specified at the design stage.

Integration with backend systems

Is your site going to allow clients to interact with your in-house systems? Are they going to be able to review matters in your practice management or case management systems? Are they going to be able to look at details of your lawyers held in your HR System? Are they going to be able to pay their bills online? Are they going to have access to documents in your Document Management System? Your design specification must show clearly how this integration will be achieved. Most importantly it must show how it will be done securely and efficiently. Your clients want to be sure that you are not going to let anyone else see details of their matters nor do they want to wait ages while details are retrieved from a small server sitting in the depths of your office network.

Website scalability

This thing may take off. It might get big. Are there particular times when the site will be busier than normal? Are there secure areas of the site that use complex encryption techniques that make heavy demands on the servers? Has the design taken this in to account. There is more to making a website work efficiently than just putting it on a more powerful server.

Testing

Who is going to test the site before it goes live? What tests are going to be done? These must all be specified in the contract documentation. Thought should be given to tying in payment obligations to successful completion of the acceptance tests.

Data Protection Act

Are you going to collect data from visitors to the site? Will they be asked to fill in a registration form? You have obligations under the Data Protection Act with regards to data collected this way just as you do with any other personal data you hold. Privacy on-line is a hot topic and the site must be designed to allow full compliance with statutory obligations in this area and also with emerging best practice.

Change control

As work continues on a project it is easy to get carried away with new ideas. Without proper controls timescales and costs can spiral. Too many projects end up over budget and late bearing little resemblance to what was expected at the start because the specification changed so often during the course of the project. This isn’t to say that the specification cannot or should not change but it must be done in a controlled way. Changes must be documented and the documentation must show how the design differs from the original specification and what impact it will have on the project. Has consideration been given to the effect that this change will have on the rest of the site? Is this change going to push out the timescales? Is it going to increase costs? Your nominated project manager must sign off all changes.

Delivery timescales and payment schedules

When is your new website going to be delivered? What happens if it is late? For anything but the simplest project you are likely to specify a number of milestones during the project. For example delivery of a prototype delivery of the finished design commencement of testing delivery to the live environment and finally “go live”. You should use these milestones as checkpoints and link staged payments to them.

Maintaining the site

What tools can be provided for managing the content of the site once it is live? Will you have to go back to the design agency every time you want the site updated or can they provide tools to allow you to mange the site yourself? How much time will it take to manage the site? Have you got suitable staff? If the agency does it for you how long will it take for changes to be made live? How much will it cost? If the agency provides tools for you to do it yourself what happens if you want to move the site later on? Can you take those tools with you?

Hosting the site

As with the design of your site you have a number of options when it comes to hosting. If you have a leased line internet connection you could host it yourself. The company who designed and built the site may well be able to host it or you could use a dedicated third party. Whichever you choose you should have a hosting agreement that will specify what services are to be provided. This agreement will usually include a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Availability

Does your site have to be up and running 24 hours a day 7 days a week? What are the consequences of it being unavailable? How long could you cope with it being unavailable? You need to consider all of these questions. The answers will help you to determine what sort of hosting service you require. It may be cheaper to host the service yourself but if 24/7 availability is critical can you provide the array of duplicate and redundant equipment need to ensure this together with the army of staff to monitor it?

Hosting scalability

Your website has been designed to cope with the thousands of visits you expect as it becomes more well known but can the hosting service cope? How quickly and easily can the site be moved to more powerful servers? How much will it cost to provide a faster connection between the server and the internet?

Security

Your website uses all the latest technology to encrypt traffic between your clients’ web browser and the server your web site designers have built a clever system requiring your clients to enter a user name and password before they can view their latest bill. However what has the hosting service put in the way to stop someone coming in “through the back door” and changing the content of the site or stealing your client records?

These are just some of the questions that you must ask before embarking on your new web project. You won’t be able to answer all of them and the importance you place on them will depend on your particular circumstances. However you must consider all of them and ensure you take proper advice on the contractual elements of the process.

Richard Martin is IT director at Morgan Cole Cardiff and Mark Smith is a solicitor at Morgan Cole Reading. Richard and Mark can be contacted at richard.martin@morgan-cole.com and mark.smith@morgan-cole.com respectively.