What a tangled web we weave

Ensuring your website is maintained with relevant and informative content

Websites should reflect what visitors want and users should be able to find what they need quickly and effortlessly. Firms with company goals as the main focus on their websites will achieve little success. Visitors need to gain an immediate positive impression in order to stay on the website and return. Keeping them there is essentially a matter of ensuring that content is valid and relevant to the visitor. Stewart Thompson of The Martin Tolhurst Partnership Solicitors explains why the content of a website and keeping that content up-to-date is so important.

It is popular for websites to contain a variety of information to cater for their different types of visitors. Clients may want service information, the partners may want to see the latest management accounts, fee-earners may want to use the site to obtain useful reference material and employees may simply want to be able to read the latest copy of the company newsletter.

With this demand for increased content comes a new challenge, that of managing and co-ordinating all of this information. Organisations may be reluctant to employ additional experts to carry out this task but they recognise that using non-technical staff may simply frustrate the task. But the problem of web content will continue to grow as websites get bigger, visitor numbers increase and the demand for information escalates.

This is when content management comes in. It allows firms to maintain and manage their websites by allowing key personnel from all parts of the firm (eg, conveyancing, probate, matrimonial, finance, personnel, etc) to be able to update their own section or sections of the website. And they do not have to have to be experts to do it.

Websites that are managed on a content management basis can let employees and other key contributors change and update the content whenever it is necessary. Updating is faster because users can update web content using standard desktop applications, without having to wait for the experts to find the time to do it.

Clearly, for content management to work well, an efficient workflow system needs to be in place. A simple model is at Figure 1. Careful co-ordination of users’ updates is essential when users work at different locations and there must be a clear audit trail of all website content. Certain parts of the website may also be restricted to specific users (eg, partners may not want the personnel department to be able to amend the finance section of the website and vice versa).

An efficient content management system will allow the employee or external source full responsibility for updating section(s) of the website. Employees will probably appreciate the more direct involvement and the firm ensures that it is not overlooking the knowledge that its employees have, which will manifest itself on the website. Everyone involved can see and evaluate the changes as they make them. Web updates are loaded more quickly and therefore, the updates are more valuable.

Clients could obtain regular updates on their matter or might be able to download any previous correspondence. This can encourage a closer relationship between the fee-earner and the client because the fee-earner is seen to be addressing the client’s needs. Martin Tolhurst Partnership is presently evaluating Aim Professional’s product called ClientConnect that provides for this connectivity between the fee-earner and the client (visit www.aimlegal.com).

With this system, each client is given a unique username and password. Once they have logged in they can then access a range of services, including online quotes (a simple bespoke format is presently operating on the firm’s website at www.martintolhurst.co.uk), status reports on their matter(s), basic legal advice and previous and relevant documents.

A key feature of ClientConnect and of similar products is that it is dynamic ie, the graphics and format are fixed so that users cannot accidentally delete, corrupt or change the structure of the website. Even without ClientConnect, a firm’s website would need to be similarly designed to ensure that users can only change and update the content of the site, (including graphics), and not the framework.

Martin Tolhurst Partnership considered that, for an effective content management system, it needed to:

Review the market for a content management solution that suits its business and business strategy

The site must be useful to both the employee and to the client so finding the common ground in the user and business goals is essential. Until the goals are defined, the firm will not be able to determine what information is required for the site.

For a bespoke system, Martin Tolhurst’s knew that a web professional would need to be commissioned to set up the content management system before users could begin updating. The content management system would need to have a clearly defined layout and style (and this task could not be underestimated). Any later changes would also need the services of the web professional so mistakes would be costly. However, once created, anyone should then be able to update the content. Nevertheless, developing a custom-built system is a major commitment in time and resources. Extra training may be required and IT experts may need to be recruited. There is also the testing phase to iron out any bugs within the bespoke system and consistent support may not be available because of staff turnover.

An alternative, and much cheaper option was to consider an off-the-shelf product (like ClientConnect). It could be adapted to give it a more personal appearance, but it would still retain most of its original identity as the vendor’s product. However a big advantage here was that implementation of what is a pre-tested product would be much quicker and training becomes the responsibility of the vendor and not of the firm. New releases would contain better features, some of which the firm may not have even considered with a bespoke system.

Review the features required of its content management system

The partnership set about determining its site requirements, such as;

Content quality,
An integrated workflow system to minimise the chance of errors being posted to the website. Information needs to flow through clearly defined paths,
A user registration feature to overcome any editing conflicts that would otherwise arise,
Easy set up of page templates, user permissions, security policies, etc. Using templates ensures that the website will be consistent in layout as users are forced to work in common desktop applications,
A document history so that previous versions can be viewed (and a complete recovery of a previous version, if necessary),
Automated scheduling of data, ensuring that date sensitive information is added and removed at the appropriate times,
Standard settings, controlled centrally, to ensure that the website remains consistent in terms of format, colour, layout, etc,
Clear installation and upgrade functions,
A format that is quick and easy to use, but not at the expense of client functionality,
Ease of use by a non-technical employee to avoid intervention from the IT Department,
Automatic insertion of document date and author,
Minimal training time.

A browser-based system, enabling contributors to work from any location eliminates the need to install and maintain software at these locations.

Select both technical and non-technical administrators to oversee user permissions, web content and to manage the workflow

Investment in training needed to be considered and the choice of administrators had to be made carefully. The training itself needed to be both easy to learn and easy to use. Questions such as ‘who will be a web content contributor? and, ‘who will vet and approve the web content’ still need to be addressed. The firm will have to prepare for the reluctance of non-technical staff to take on these additional tasks. The question is then about the trade-off between administering/updating the website and the staff’s core duties.

Monitor costs

The off-the-shelf product has clear costs while the bespoke build is much harder to determine. Off-the shelf products are becoming cheaper as more vendors enter the market. For Martin Tolhurst, the final choice could well be a mixture of the two. On the one hand, simple, static content provides the foundation of the website (eg, home page, fee-earner profiles, services provided, etc), requiring very little maintenance that can be carried out in-house. This ensures that the firm is not paying for expensive web professionals. More complex features provided in extranets, for instance where clients can access their matters, is likely to be given over to an off-the-shelf product due to its complexity and the need for the product to be reliable - the client will soon be put off by a system that consistently fails.

The consideration of costs also involved considering the value of the information itself. There is a cost in terms of how long it takes employees to get the information onto the website. Of course, if the information is important (eg, client matter updates) then cost may not matter. In most cases it will be difficult to quantify these costs but it might be possible to determine the cost of managing content. If these are high, then the firm might be better off not having it on the site at all. This is an issue that the partnership is taking very seriously.

Selecting a content management system that is able to support a firm’s business strategy will determine the success of the website. Unfortunately, not all content management systems are the same and selecting one that in the event cannot meet the firm’s needs, will be a waste of resources. Ease of use, content, workflow and cost need to be at the top of the firm’s agenda, but before all of that, the firm must understand its own needs and objectives for its website. Of course, the essential question is that of cost. Clearly, if the firm can do without a content management system then that’s fine, but it must then ask itself what the cost will be of not adopting it. As more firms adopt content management, the laggards will find that the cost will manifest itself as client dissatisfaction.

Stewart Thompson is IT manager at The Martin Tolhurst Partnership Solicitors. He can be contacted at mtpg@martintolhurst.co.uk

Footnotes

Some of the goals that Martin Tolhurst needed to determine were as follows:

Frequency at which content would be updated
The type and extent of changes that would be required,
The number of contributors necessary,
The level of technical support required (and what was available),
Whether the content would be text only or a mixture of text and graphics (identifying which desktop applications would be needed),
The level of approval required before the update is posted to the website,
The audit trail (for legal reasons).