New Year's Resolution: Update Your Website
It is a new year and we’ve all jotted down a few resolutions for ourselves – and probably already broken a few too. So now is a good time to also make a few resolutions for your organization as well. Start things off this year with a fresh look for one of the most public faces of your firm – your website.
It is easy to forget about your website after you first launch it. Many law firms have what is typically called a “brochure” site, which is just a few pages of marketing copy about their firm and what type of services they provide. With the web increasingly becoming an integral part of our daily lives, including locating products and services, your website may require some freshening up. This is not to suggest that you need to completely redesign your website, but there are several types of approaches you can take to update your site, ranging from easy to challenging projects. You will want to focus on updates that will help you bring in clients who are more informed about you and your firm, what you do, and how you can help them.
Easy
Don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to updating your website? These easy updates are the ones you can make in the shortest amount of time possible, yet which can still improve your website by leaps and bounds.
When was the last time you looked at the copy on your website? Was it last year? When the site was launched back in 2003? By revising your marketing copy you can give your website an intellectual face-lift. One tip when revising marketing copy – remember that visitors scan, more than read, long paragraphs of copy. Break your copy up into coherent chunks, and use sub-heads so visitors can hone in on what they are looking for quickly.
Have your attorneys been published in the last year? Have they won significant cases or been involved in visible pro bono or public service projects? Make sure their biographies reflect these additions. Clients like to see more than an educational background for attorneys they may potentially work with. Plus, are you still using black and white photos of your attorneys? Maybe it is time for a new photo shoot where you can get color photos of your attorneys. These photos can be multi-purposed and also used for press releases, brochures, and publications.
You always want to ensure that your potential clients know how to contact you and find your office. Having a main office phone number (or client intake line), detailed directions to your firm, as well as a map, is a great client service. Don’t make them take the extra step to look you up on an Internet map service; give them one right on your website. A bonus to having this information on your site is that it will help your firm get picked up on local search results as well.
Are You Ready for Local Search?
I am the Treasurer for my condo association, and this makes me in charge of researching and signing contracts for all of our maintenance services during the year. Winter was quickly approaching and I needed to find a new snow removal service for our building. As I surf the Internet daily, I headed to Google Local search to scout out companies to contact for a RFP. I use local search on a regular basis for a variety of searches for my area, mainly restaurants. My success rate is usually pretty high, and I thought this search would be no different. I was wrong. Instead, my search produced only two snow removal companies, and the rest were lawn care and maintenance services. Knowing that many lawn care services double as snow removal services, I didn’t feel too bad with the results, but what discouraged me more was the lack of supporting information for me to read in my quest to find a service.
Like many other consumers, I prefer to do as much research and comparison of products and services as possible prior to placing any phone calls to companies. This includes reading company websites to find out as much information as is available about the organization before I send out an RFP. I want to know how long they have been in business, where they are located, how to contact them, other clients they serve, endorsements and more. In the case of this particular search however, I found that many of the relevant companies did not have websites. The websites that were referenced were local yellow pages type pages. One company did have a website, and I was even able to do an RFP through an online form which made the process really easy. That is convenience that wins business, and it won mine.
Why is my situation important to you? Local search is growing more popular with your next generation of clients, and if your firm isn’t listed in the local search engines, and not with just a phone number, you could be losing valuable business.
Year-in-Review: BIG in 2005 Update
It is the end of the year and with 2006 creeping up on us, now is a great time to take a look back to see if my technology predictions held true.
Last year, I predicted that three types of technologies were going to hit it BIG in 2005 and go from early adopter to main-stream use. Those technologies were RSS, desktop search, and collaboration software. After looking back at 2005, it is safe to say that I was about 50/50 on these predictions. Not all of them became main-stream, but have become more well known to the average Internet user. I think I was one year too early for my predictions to come true. So let’s review and give a reality check on RSS, desktop search, and collaboration tools.
RSS – Really Simple Syndication
My Prediction:
RSS began to grow in 2004 and it is going to be BIG in 2005. Starting to gain speed at the tail end of this year, online publishers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a variety of other online publishers are all accepting the medium, it will only be a matter of time before the little orange icon is everywhere. RSS aggregators such as Bloglines, Feed Demon, and even MyYahoo! are bringing the medium into wide spread use.
Reality Check: RSS didn’t come as far as I thought it would this year. That’s not to say that it didn’t make a big impact on the way we gather information. RSS aggregators such as Bloglines and NetNewsWire had stellar years in terms of gaining users. In fact, Google just released a beta of a Web-based news aggregator called Google Reader. With more than 1000 known aggregator programs and bots scouring the Internet, it is safe to say that RSS is picking up speed. In fact, RSS has had so much impact that Windows Vista, Microsoft’s next operating system due out next year, will have RSS aggregation capabilities built right in.
Where RSS fell short was in the sense that users either did or didn’t know they were using RSS. Publishers still bury their RSS icons either in their footer or deep on their sidebars which makes it difficult to promote. Let’s face it, the term RSS alone, an acronym that has many definitions, turns the average Internet user off or confuses them. According to the Yahoo’s recent RSS study, 12 percent of users were aware of RSS, while 4 percent have knowingly used RSS. Based on that, the surprising statistic is that 27 percent of Internet users have a start page that uses RSS feeds such as My Yahoo!, My MSN, or Google’s personalized start.
The good news is that with Microsoft taking on the battle to call RSS something else in Windows Vista. In Vista, RSS will be called “News Feeds,” a more appropriate term for the type of content that is syndicated over RSS in my opinion. RSS didn’t hit as big as I thought, but I think the release of Vista will be the tipping point for this technology.
Desktop Search
My Prediction:
Desktop search again started to pick up at the tail end of 2004 with the release of Google Desktop. Companies and products like X1, Google, Copernic, and Blinkx are taking the desktop search category by storm; Microsoft has a lot of catch-up to do with Longhorn, their next OS that will have a new search functionality built into it. I use X1 on my laptop and Copernic on my desktop. So far I’m impressed with both and have to say that this will be big when you find that Outlook search is too slow to find that one e-mail in your over-cluttered inbox. Both are time savers when searching e-mail, files and documents, as well as attachments.
Reality Check:Desktop search has slowed down in the last quarter of this year. The first half of 2005 brought on Yahoo desktop search with a version of X1, called X1 Lite, embedded in it. Google also released an enterprise edition of their desktop search as well as an updated Version 2 of their personal edition which integrated access to Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Talk. After Google’s Version 2 was released, the focus on desktop search faded away as far as buzz is concerned. Companies like X1 have continued to improve on their technology and product line by releasing an enterprise edition early in 2005.
I thought desktop search was going to become more main-stream, but I have found that toolbars are still popular. I see them bundled more with other downloads than desktop search. I still find my version of X1 indispensable when searching for documents, e-mail messages, or photos.
Collaboration Tools
My Prediction:
Last on my list of predictions are collaboration tools. These include blogs, wikis, and forums (or bulletin boards). I start by asking a question: how many e-mail messages are in your inbox right now that are either a) conversations about a specific project you are working on, b) a version of a document you are working on with others, or c) messages of ideas from a group project? It seems to me that half of my disaster of an inbox is a combination of all of those. I work with three to five other staff members to publish e-newsletters, e-mail promotions, and Web site development. Most of those e-mail messages are versions of the same message with everyone’s corrections on it before I can format it to send to our member base. It can be very daunting to keep track of it all. Collaboration tools such as a Wiki (basically online whiteboards) can save my inbox and yours too!
Blogs and forums are good for knowledge bases from what I have experienced with using products and services. Forums are great as an online community tool. Forums are a combination of a blog and a wiki. Anyone who has an account can post a message, and anyone with an account can reply. Some good examples of forums can be found at SitePoint.com and Macromedia’s Developers Forums.
Reality Check: Collaboration tools are still growing. Wikis like Wikipedia have taken off as an authoritative source of information. Blogs and forums have continued to grow as knowledge base tools for companies both internally and externally. Many major software companies use forums and blogs in their support areas of their Web sites. Where this area is growing is collaboration using Web-based tools. The days of hosting a file on one person’s server to be accessed by many are dwindling. The next wave of the Internet is expanding the sharing of information through central Web hosts. Examples are 37 Signals’ Writeboard and Upstartle’s Writely. These two examples are not necessarily wikis, blogs, or forums, but rather secure online spaces where many can contribute on one document and then export out to popular word processing programs.
Collaboration seems to be the one of the needs of Internet users who are decentralized. Using Web-based tools seems to be one of the answers that will be explored in the coming year.
Conclusion
I think all three of these predictions are not over. With the next version of the Web coming, deemed Web 2.0, the Web is not only going to become a smaller, but more robust place to work in. By this I don’t necessarily mean Web geeks, I also mean average Internet users. The Web is opening doors and breaking down barriers allowing anyone to collaborate, interact, and produce and retrieve content in a variety of new ways.
Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX, Ruby on Rails, APIs, and the DOM will enable users to collaboration, create, and share documents in ways that were much more difficult prior to late 2005. 2006 promises to be another stellar year for the World Wide Web. So hold on tight and be prepared to find solutions to problems you have been racking your brain over for years.
This article was originally published in Law Practice Today, December 2005 issue.
What's BIG in 2005? RSS, Desktop Search, and Collaboration Tools
As 2004 came to a close every business and technology magazine, Web site, and blog made their predictions about what will be the next big technology or tool for 2005. So it is only fitting that I put my $.02 into the mix on what I predict will be BIG in 2005. We start our predictions with Really Simple Syndication or also known as RSS.
RSS – Really Simple Syndication
RSS, Atom, or just plain old syndication. It doesn’t matter what technical term you put on it, but RSS began to grow in 2004 and it is going to be BIG in 2005. Starting to gain speed at the tail end of this year, online publishers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and a variety of other online publishers are all accepting the medium, it will only be a matter of time before the little orange icon is everywhere. RSS aggregators such as Bloglines, Feed Demon, and even MyYahoo! are bringing the medium into wide spread use.
If you don’t know what RSS is, and this means beyond the acronym, here is a quick lesson.
RSS is the brain child of Dave Winer and was developed to syndicate content to the masses over the Internet back in 1997. The development was picked up by Netscape and now three versions exist, all working very similar in style. The “really simple” part comes from the fact that the text is not heavily formatted. RSS is not “new” technology; it has just become more popular in the last year and a half. Now you will see little orange “XML” icons on many Web sites.
RSS and Atom feeds are XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) files and when initially clicked on you are presented with a bunch of code. The code is not what you are worried about, it is the URL of that code that you want to copy and paste into a news aggregator to “subscribe” to it. Your news aggregator interprets that XML code and displays the content in a simple to read format.
When a Web site is updated with new content an XML file is updated with either an excerpt or full content of the new information. That XML file sits on the Internet in a single location. A news aggregator that you either download locally to your computer or have an account with online with a Web based aggregator pings that XML file on a time interval. Sometimes the interval is every 15 minutes, other times it is once a day. When the XML file is read by your news aggregator the new content is syndicated and you are able to read either the excerpt or full content of the new information posted to your favorite Web site or online publication.
RSS has changed not only the way I gather information, but how I read information. I don’t “surf” anymore. I rely on other bloggers and Web sites to direct me through links to similar information sources, most of which have RSS feeds of their own. I now have roughly 200 feeds in about a dozen categories in my news aggregator. I handily download my feeds, most of which are full text feeds, in the morning on my laptop and read them on my hour long train ride to the office. Bottom line, it works. I get the information I desire to stay on top of key topics in the legal industry and I don’t waste hours going through bookmarks, sifting through online ads, or wondering if I missed an e-newsletter by an over zealous spam filter. The best way I can describe RSS is this: Information you want, delivered to your desktop in real-time, spam free.
Desktop Search
It only seems natural that the concept of search move from the Internet to your desktop. Not only for you to search the Internet from your desktop and not via a Web browser, but also to search your own files. Microsoft has done a pretty good job of providing a difficult and slow search tool in Windows and Outlook.
Desktop search again started to pick up at the tail end of 2004 with the release of Google Desktop. Companies and products like X1, Google, Copernic, and Blinkx are taking the desktop search category by storm. Microsoft has a lot of catch-up to do with Longhorn, their next OS that will have a new search functionality built into it. I use X1 on my laptop and Copernic on my desktop. So far I’m impressed with both and have to say that this will be big when you find that Outlook search is too slow to find that one e-mail in your over-cluttered inbox. Both are time savers when searching e-mail, files and documents, as well as attachments.
Similar to Internet search engines, a desktop search engine indexes your hard drive. Since the first index will always take the longest time it is wise to build an initial base index. The index grows as you add more files and e-mail messages arrive. Then when you need to search for a specific file or word the index is searched and results are given to you much like an Internet search engine. You can preview the file or find the directory that it is located in.
It never fails that there will be a time when you need to search for that one piece of crucial information for your job. How many times have you said “It’s somewhere here in my e-mail?” You begin to sort and search yet it is taking too long to find the information you need. That is because each time you do a search in Explorer or Outlook it is actually searching your directories at that time. The indexing is the key for the speed of a desktop search. Outlook it notorious for being slow when searching for keywords in your inbox and sub-folders. Desktop search is fast and efficient. I can find files as I type with X1 and almost just as easy with Copernic.
Collaboration Tools
Last on my list of predictions are collaboration tools. These include blogs, Wikis, and forums, also known as bulletin boards. I start by asking a question: how many e-mail messages are in your inbox right now that are either a) conversations about a specific project you are working on, b) a version of a document you are working on with others, or c) messages of ideas from a group project? It seems to me that half of my disaster of an inbox is a combination of all of those. I work with three to five other staff members to publish e-newsletters, e-mail promotions, and Web site development. Most of those e-mail messages are versions of the same message with everyone’s corrections on it before I can format it to send to our member base. It can be very daunting to keep track of it all.
Collaboration tools such as a Wiki can save my inbox and yours too! A Wiki is basically an online whiteboard. It is a Web page that is instantly editable by anyone with little to no HTML knowledge required. When working on a single document or project a Wiki can keep all of your information in one spot and many contributors can correct, add, or delete information. Blogs are good for collaboration to an extent as they initially are more of a one way conversation with the functionality for others to comment back. The ability to instantly update that a Wiki provides seems to outbid any feature a blog has in my opinion. Companies such as Basecamp, SocialText and Jot Spot are providing these services now and seem to be doing a good job. Expect to see more companies to move into this space.
Blogs and forums are good for knowledge bases from what I have experienced with using products and services. Forums are great as an online community tool. Forums are a combination of a blog and a Wiki. Anyone who has an account can post a message, and anyone with an account can reply. Some good examples of forums can be found at SitePoint.com and Macromedia’s Developers Forums.
Conclusion
It should be no surprise when you see some of these tools becoming more prominent this year. I can guarantee you will see the XML icon on more Web sites in 2005. If you are looking for an aggregator you can find a good list by doing a Google search on “RSS Aggregator.” I hope you can find these tools helpful in your online life and work. We’ll check back this time next year to do an evaluation of these predictions.
This article was adapted from Fred Faulkner’s blog post Big in 2005 at http://www.frederickfaulkner.com.
This article was originally published in the January 2005 issue of Law Practice Today.
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