Use the Web to:
* Professionally Position Yourself and Practice
* Generate Leads
* Provide a Due Diligence Resource for Prospects
* Communicate with and Manage Clients
* Communicate with and Manage Staff
A brochure website is not competitive in a first class marketplace. Professional design and simple architecture/navigation used to be all you needed to have a powerful website. Now these are only a portion of your bare minimum to have a Web presence that will show a return.
The new Web is about content and interactivity. Yes, a professional design is always a must. And achieving simplicity in architecture and navigation is increasingly important as websites become publishing systems. But a small static brochure site will not:
* Maintain significant presence in the search engines (= market presence, perception is reality)
* Provide a resource for visitors thus giving reason to stay and to return (= professional positioning as an “expert”, perception is reality)
* Tap into the new Web exchange of content (= professional positioning as connected to the present, perception is reality)
Be out there in the new Web – online communities, search engines, blog engines, video sharing sites, social bookmarking. Capitalize on the new Web. Develop your Website in Web 2.0 technologies. Enter the open-source world.
But before you do any of that, please create specific goals and objectives. How will the Web function in your business model and in what ways does that benefit you in terms of revenue?
Specific options for your Website:
* Articles on your Core Areas of Service
* High-Quality Design
* Interactive Maps and Directions
* Contact Information and Forms
* Interactive and Download-able Legal Forms
* About/History/Bio Copy and Photos
* Blog with RSS Feeds (allows easy publication of content by you and easy syndication of that content by others)
* Video/Audio from Seminars Given
* Video/Audio Blogs
* Social Networking (YouTube, Etc.)
Think it’s crazy for a Lawyer to be on YouTube? Look at Showell Blades, Bankruptcy Lawyer. We filmed his seminar at a community college and put it on YouTube. The video was watched over 800 times in the first 8 months. The video appears on multiple bankruptcy attorneys websites around the nation (fed into their site through RSS… the same way we fed it into his own site – see it on his Showell’s site). And notice how many people have done the same thing since we did it for Showell.