Net Q & A

View Q & A Archives.

Question of the Month: January 2000

What are the most common design errors seen on law firm web sites?     

Answer

Here are the best explanations I can come up with for the plague of pathetically slow law firm Web sites:

C Law firms assume that elaborate-looking graphics must be higher quality, and therefore must be worth higher fees. Most Web site design firms are not anxious to disabuse them of these notions.

C Most draft Web sites are demonstrated from a local hard drive, or over ultra high speed Internet connections. Either way, even a bloated site will appear to download with reasonable speed. This conceals the poor quality of the design from the purchasing law firm until it is too late.

C Many graphic designers grew up working in print media, where the concept of "download speed" means nothing. They are lost when asked to design for the Internet.

Skilled designers, on the other hand, know how to make graphics that look good but download quickly. Graphics can also be "optimized" to make them download faster. Some graphics software can do this, like the newest version of the popular "Paint Shop Pro." The "GIF Bot" and "GIF Lube" features at the Netmechanic.com and Web Site Garage Web sites are good alternatives for those who don’t own such software.

Some novices get the idea that graphics in JPEG format are smaller than those in GIF format. This is a myth. JPEG format is usually faster for photos and other complex images, but GIF format is much faster for images with areas of solid color, like cartoons and other line art.

Other Problem Areas To Avoid

Any or all of the following features may occasionally be found on a good Web site, but more often they tend to be found on the worst sites:

Under Construction Signs. Every good Web site is always under construction. Don’t ask visitors to grade you on a curve because you haven’t gotten yours right yet. The right way to do it is to list specific planned "coming attractions" and give visitors a way to be notified when they are in fact added.

Visible Hit Counters. These slow page downloading, are inaccurate and are generally considered a sign of an amateur site. Even worse, they don’t provide enough detailed information to be useful. A decent Web host will provide detailed, accurate statistics that will give you a much better understanding of who is visiting your site and what they do when they visit. The "WebTrends" reporting software some Web hosts use is deservedly popular. If you feel you must brag about the high number of visitors your site receives, do it with a link to the statistics, as does http://www.visalaw.com.

Animations. Animated graphics tend to annoy visitors. They make it hard to concentrate on the text of a page. Most of them contribute to a general air of tackiness.

Illegible Designs. The worst offenders are patterned backgrounds or odd color schemes. Almost all patterned or "textured" backgrounds make text harder to read. Light colored text on a dark background is a way to try to look cool. It almost never works on a law firm site. Dark colored text on a light background is easiest to read on a computer monitor, just as it is on the printed page.

Splash Screens. A splash screen is a graphic that appears initially when you try to visit a Web site. Some of them are even animated. Larger law firms seem to be the worst offenders. I don’t say that splash screens could never be effective, but I’ve never seen one on a law firm site that was an asset. If you are toying with the idea of a splash screen, ask yourself this question first:

Would it be appropriate to have the splash screen as a link from your main page, perhaps labeled something like "A graphic presentation intended to produce a more favorable emotional impression of our law firm"? If it would not be appropriate to make viewing it an option, then why would you make it mandatory?

If splash screens are so bad, then why do so many large law firm sites seem to have them? The best answer I have figured out it that design firms push them to help justify higher fees, and they meet a receptive audience with some older lawyers who control budgets and who, in their naïveté, want the Internet to act like television.

Frames. Frames are a way of dividing a Web page into sections, some of which can remain fixed while information in other frames changes. Frames were all the rage a few years ago, but there seems to be a consensus among today’s best designers that their drawbacks outweigh any advantages. Among other problems, frames make it more difficult for others to give "pinpoint citations" to sections of your Web site, thus making your site less attractive to others who might want to build links (and the resulting referrals of potential clients) to you. Further, frames are more difficult for search engines to process, so frames-based sites tend to show up lower than they would if their content were in a more search-engine-friendly format. Few, if any, of the alleged advantages of frames cannot be easily duplicated by a skilled designer using tables and "server side includes" (both of which are easy if using modern design software like Microsoft FrontPage).

Clip Art. Standard clip art is seldom appropriate for a law firm Web site right out of the box. Unless selected and placed by a master designer, it tends to look cheap. You can usually get a classier looking result by turning the name of your firm into a graphic and using tables with colors inside. The top graphic at The Alexander Law Firm  illustrates these techniques. Navigation buttons can also be used to add color. The main logo at the site of Kaufman & Canoles demonstrates this technique. This type of logo is fairly easy to design with a program like Paint Shop Pro.

Jerry Lawson

This page last revised: January 01, 2002 .