Using Experts

I spend quite a bit of time working with lawyers and other professionals and telling them that they need to use experts to help them run their businesses. This week I've had a reminder that I need to do this too.

The first reminder was a comment from a friend that my own web site was no longer up to scratch. My site is very simple and I had been using iWeb to author it. Apple stopped supporting iWeb some time ago, sadly, but I had stuck with it - meaning that the pages it built were not optimised for new browsers, for HTML5 or for mobile devices. I knew that there was a problem with my site on Firefox, but had been trying to pretend it didn't matter. My fried - who does this sort of thing for a living - held my by the lapels and explained (loudly) that it was no longer ok. I (finally) took his advice and re-designed the site using a new product to me - Sandvox - which has produced a new, clean, site that works well, so far as I can tell, on every platform. Let me know what you think - www.mar-aon.co.uk.

The second reminder was in connection with a charity that I chair - www.livingrainforest.com. We are re-organising the charity and giving something called The Trust for Sustainable Living prominence. My good friend at Bull Rodger offered to help us with the rebranding of the TSL identity. Foolishly I had thought that we would meet and he would draw a new logo. As I often say to my clients - it's not as simple as that. Quite rightly, he needs to understand the charity and its context and its objectives and then he will be able to design an identity that will fit us properly. The Director of the charity pointed out that I had introduced the expert and so we should listen to him.

A valuable lesson - listen to the experts. If only someone had told me earlier...

Keeping Up To Date

I am not an expert in either marketing or in social networking. I don't think, however, that it needs an expert to know that:

1. Your marketing materials should always be up to date;
2. Your website is part of your marketing effort
3. If you wish to engage in social networking, then you need to actually engage in it and not simply ignore it after a while

This minor rant has come about as a result of some research for a number of different clients. I have been working with clients in the legal, educational and charity sectors in the last couple of weeks (I'm very lucky to have the variety) and have noticed that many of the companies/schools/charities I looked at seemed to get one or all of the items on the above list wrong.

I've seen blogs with the latest entry over a year old and have found links to non-functioning Twitter feeds. I've seen websites with broken links and links to events which are impossible to attend, what with them being in 2008. I've seen websites boasting that the company concerned (no names, no pack drill - but this was a law firm) could contact you by "post, fax and email" (wow).

I've looked at schools which offer the web visitor the chance to see content from pupils - only to find that eight of the ten pages were empty and the two that had content were ten months old.

In my opinion it is perfectly acceptable for small organisations - whether law firms, schools or charities - to have a small web site. Organisations this size are unlikely to have spare resources to support real-time engagement and may not have time for regular web updates. No problem. The problem comes when engagement is started or offered - and then not carried forward.

If you own or work for a small organisation, you should have a web site, I think. It can be very simple with basic information about who you are and what you do. Schools should have some dates on there and charities should have some way of accepting donations (which can be done from a link to a third-party) - and everyone should have contact information. That's it though. 

Much better to do a little well than to try to be all things to all people and to come unstuck.

PS - as a result of this research I had a good look through my own web site and did a little housekeeping!

If you're going to do it, do it properly

I have spent some time over the last few days looking at a number of websites for both legal providers and for small charities. It has been an interesting exercise, and some interesting things became very obvious to me.

The first of these is that many law firms - and regional law firms do seem to be rather worse in this respect - seem to have spent a very small amount of money on their website, and to have spent this some time ago. Since that small expenditure they have obviously not felt it necessary to either spend any more keeping it up to date, or even to have visited it recently. The shining star in this regard was the site of Connell Associates (http://www.connellassociates.co.uk/). Until very recently, they had a spectacularly bad web site, full of typographical errors, spelling errors, and sentences that made no sense at all. They have now, as you will have seen if you clicked on the link above, put a new "holding" page in place which is, at least, in English this time. Congratulations on doing something about the mess that was your last site.

Sadly they are not unusual. Many of the sites I have been visiting appear to have been written by someone's 14 year old nephew who has spent many minutes learning to write HTML or to use Dreamweaver. Few have given any thought to their design and many are so badly put together that they are difficult to read. This from a profession which professes to be concerned about the details.

What is more interesting, however, is the amount of space spent on profiles of the partners and lawyers and copies of things they might have written. The sites appear to be based on the principle of "they [the clients] will want to know about us". As a client, I'm not sure I care about the lawyers - I'm more interested in what they will do for me. A remarkably small number of law firm websites had any form of recommendation or review from clients.

Contrast that with many of the small charity sites I have been looking at. An almost equal number of them appear to have been designed by amateurs, but what is really interesting is their focus. It can be hard to find profiles of the people running the charity. Instead the sites focus on the activities of the charity and often have quotes from the beneficiaries - the "clients".

This is all by way of continuing my theme of placing the client at the heart of what your organisation does. The law firms were remiss in that they seems to avoid even mentioning their clients - which certainly gives the impression that they don't really care that much and will expect a client to fit in with what they do.

This is not complicated. It's quite a simple exercise to sit down and think about what the clients want. You could even ask them... Personal clients of law firms who are looking at a web site for the first time will have two main concerns - neither of which are usually addressed. The first is - can this firm do the work properly. This can be addressed by client quotations, recommendations and, perhaps, by a survey ("80% of our clients were delighted with this service in our recent poll", for example). The issue of cost can be addressed by showing fixed prices on the web site. Most sites I viewed went very far out of their way to avoid this. As a prospective client who is shopping around, I do not want to visit a web site to be told that I need to phone someone to get a price.  Nor does saying that the first meeting, or first half hour, is free - I still want to know how much it will be after that.

So - both types of organisations can improve. Expenditure on a web site is an investment. Have a professional design and professional implementation - it does not need to be vastly expensive. Secondly - address the concerns of your clients. If you don't know what these are, then ask!

I will now declare an interest - I recommend the following site as a good example of an effective web site. It is the site for The Living Rainforest - and my interest is that I am the Chairman. Notwithstanding this - the site addresses the key audience and gives out the required information. It is simple, easy to use, gives good information - and, vitally so far as I was concerned - was excellent value for money. Have a look and see if you agree with me.