Digital White Papers

42 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER MARKETING TECHNOLOGY SEO and Web Design Best Practices For these two reasons, your website will score positively with customer/user reviews and with search engine optimization. So where do you begin? Identify what you want to influence your site visitors to do or navigate to, and determine what pages you already know that your site visitors land on most frequently. This practice will help create a sitemap which should start by being as simple and short of a path from the home page to these identified pages. There are plenty of other considerations, but as a starting point, these highly relevant, high traffic, high time-on-page view pages should be at the forefront of your web design functionality. A U T H E N T I C I T Y Another web design trend focuses on authenticity. Experience, photography and videography, and design are elements of the concept of authenticity. Using strictly out of the box layouts, stock photography, and copy-cat web design will not give you the perception of authenticity. Instead, the feeling of your firm being less than adequate might creep into a user's perception of your brand. There needs to be design elements that clearly represent your company, personify your brand, and separate your firm from the herd. Consider… » Taking your own photography using seings within your office space and aorneys within your firm as the models, » Using representative colors within your firm's logo/branding standards, » Placing the spotlight on firm-specific content like company history, value proposition, and mission statement, » Refreshing your homepage content regularly. These are just a few items to consider when thinking about the authenticity of your web design. Summary In summary, the considerations for SEO best practices and the intersection with web design follow some general guidelines which we have presented in this essay. However, it is important to also consider the changing landscape of design trends, the elusiveness of SEO indicators and so-called "formulas," user experience preferences in the future, and other unforeseen website functionalities which will inevitably impact search engine optimization and web design best practices. We offer these insights as a roadmap to help firms understand where they stand currently, where they can strive to be, and how they can prepare themselves for the eminent transformation of SEO and web design practices in the future. ILTA IGOR ILYINSKY As the founder of FirmWise, Igor has overseen the redesigns of hundreds of mid- sized law firm websites. He is a Marketing Technologist, Entrepreneur and entertaining presenter focused on advancing Law Firms to the highest level of marketing technology automation… Igor's gift is knowing how to translate techy jargon into common sense English that anyone can understand; even battle hardened attorneys. His experience in web development for nearly the past two decades and his popularity as a speaker make him the quintessential authority on what trends to pursue and what fads to avoid. As the Founder of FirmWise, the only open web hosting platform developed specifically for law firms, Igor continues to pioneer strategy for the industry on a regular basis. You can reach Igor at igor.ilyinsky@firmwise.net.

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