Branding is important to helping you stand out from the crowd. It also helps your business appear legitimate and promotes trust in your website. Even if you’re a small business just starting out, or with a tiny budget, a few simple steps can make your website look branded.

Information in this post gathered in association with a CA consumer lawyer

Use a physical address: Google may give preference to websites that list a real address (not a P.O. box) on their sites and in their WhoIs.net* information. Even if it doesn’t give you an edge in a search, a real address suggests to visitors a real business, not a fly-by-night operation that might not be around tomorrow.

Have boilerplate pages: If you want your customers to feel comfortable giving you personal information, make sure it’s easy for them to find your:

• privacy policy
• terms of service
• “about us” page
• “contact us” page

Include several ways for them to contact you, including that physical address, a phone number, email address, and a Web form.

Create press: Do things that are press-worthy, and create press releases to tell the world about them. Have a press page and media kit, too, if possible.

Have a professional-looking logo: Again, it’s about trust and visitors’ perception of your trustworthiness.

Use social media: It’s here to stay—and it’s likely that your business is being mentioned, even if you don’t have an active presence. Become part of the conversation so that you can guide (not control) any conversation to your benefit.

Michael Gray covers this advice in more detail in “How to Make Your Website Look More Legitimate.” He also offers one more piece of advice: Ask yourself if your website can pass the sniff test (or the 8th-grade, tough-cookie teacher test). If you wouldn’t do business with you, don’t expect others to.

* Service mark

Good search engine optimization (SEO) is important for attracting search engines, but it’s even more important to attract and engage human visitors. They are the ultimate clients and they like easy-to-use websites.

A well-designed navigation system makes a website easy to use. It shows visitors right away which page they’ve landed on and what it is about. It also tells them what else the site has to offer and which pages they’ve already visited.

Larisa Thomason’s Web Site Usability Checklist offers tips on what a good navigation system should offer.

Consistency: Keeping the navigation bar identical on every page ensures that visitors know how to get around your site without guessing. A single file containing all your navigation elements—called a Server Side Include (SSI)—that every page can access and load makes this easy to accomplish.

Self-explanatory links: Home, About and FAQ might be boring, but it’s crystal clear where they lead.

Text links: Not every visitor may be able to use a menu created with a dynamic scripting language (such as JavaScript). If you use a dynamic menu, be sure to also include basic text links, at least for your main links.

A site map: This can make the difference between lost visitors leaving in frustration and finding what they were looking for. Make it a simple list of text-based links and link to it from every page.

Lake County personal injury attorneys at Thompson & Evangelo, P.A. have assisted the SettlementBoard editorial team in identifying topics of importance to readers of this blog.

A home page link: Remember that people may want to go to your home page from an internal page. Make it easy for them.

A second home page link: From your site logo. Many people expect this and will click your logo before looking for a separate home page link.

A clear navigation system, with built-in redundancy for confused visitors, will improve your site’s usability and is likely to keep your visitors happier. To read all the checklists, start with the checklist for branding, the checklist of content, and then the checklist on feedback.

Making it easy for visitors to provide feedback can turn them into clients.

With the rise in the popularity of social media, many Web users expect all websites to have social elements, even law firm websites. They want to be able to ask you questions or offer comments about your legal services. Providing an email address is one popular option, but an even better idea is a feedback form.

As explained in Larisa Thomason’s Web Site Usability Checklist, a form gives you some control over the format and content of the communication. It also protects your email address from the spiders that extract addresses from websites.

Feedback forms are convenient for you, but you also want them to be convenient for your visitors. If they’re too hard to use, they might not bother, and you could lose a client.

Design your form with these tips in mind:

• Be short: Long forms scare off prospective clients, especially those who’ve never done business with you.
• Only require basic information: One way to keep a form short is to require only information necessary for you to reply, like name and email or phone. If there’s information that you’d like to collect but isn’t critical, make it optional. This also helps international visitors, who may not have a ZIP code and wouldn’t be able to submit a form requiring one.
• Highlight required fields: Make it obvious which fields are required. Common ways to do this include a red asterisk or using a different background color.
• Include other ways to contact you: Most people will probably use your feedback form, but some people still prefer the phone or even a formal letter. So make sure your phone number and mailing address appear clearly on the page.

A feedback option is an important, but often overlooked, element in a successful website design. For more information on other elements of design, read the content checklist and branding checklist. Coming soon: one final checklist on website navigation.

Images and Flash can slow down your site

An image-heavy website can be slow to load, potentially driving away impatient visitors. Slow loading can also hurt your search engine rankings, because Google factors site speed into rankings.

In his article, 29 Ways to Speed Up Your Website, Ian Lurie offers good advice on using images without slowing down your site.

Say no to Flash
Most website animation is unnecessary, but if you feel you need it, try:

• Spritely, a free jQuery plugin that lets you create animation with HTML and JavaScript
• Creating your own animated GIFs using Photoshop or GIMP, a free image editor

If you still want to use Flash, do so sparingly; no more than one or two Flash elements on a page.

Use a storage service for images
Most browsers will only load two images from one domain at a time, but will access up to four domains at once. Storing images (and other documents) on a different domain, such as Amazon S3, allows your site to load faster.

Host images on photo sharing sites
Free photo storage sites, such as Flickr or Picasa, make it easy to embed pictures on your site.

Compress images properly
There are two ways to compress images:

• Lossy: The JPEG file format uses this compression method, which gets rid of unnecessary or repetitive data points so the resulting file is smaller. It works well for photographs and colorful images.
• Lossless: GIF and PNG formats compress the image data in such a way that the original file can be recreated. It’s good for simple images without a lot of color.

Upload the right size image
Large images take time to load, no matter what size they’re displayed at. Use Photoshop or another image editor to reduce the image (and file) size before uploading it.

These few tricks can keep your image-heavy website loading quickly. Read more about how to speed up your site by cleaning up the code.

Bellevue attorneys Gregorek & Associates have assisted the CaseDetails editorial team in identifying topics of importance to readers of this blog.

Jakob Nielsen published an iPad usability report

Even before Apple’s iPad was released in April 2010, it was criticized for everything from its name to its lack of Flash capability. Shortly after it went on sale, usability guru Jakob Nielsen released a preliminary iPad usability report suggesting that the tablet was not particularly user-friendly.

In Jack Schofield’s article, Jakob Nielsen critiques the iPad’s usability failings, he talks about Apple’s focus on aesthetics at the expense of functionality. The iPad is pretty, but it’s too hard to figure out how to use and it’s too easy to make mistakes.

iPad application issues
The standard functionality we’ve learned on computers is missing on the iPad. Apps seem to hide their options and each one is different. Lacking on the iPad:

• Standard navigation
• Back button
• Search
• Homepage

Almost anything on the screen could be interactive, but there are no visual cues (like buttons that look raised) indicating click areas. It’s a guessing game.

Nielsen also believes the lack of Flash hampers the iPad, and that Apple is trying to exert too much control over what users can put on the device.

iPad touchscreen issues
Granted, touchscreen problems aren’t limited to the iPad, but we expect more from Apple.
Our fat fingers still pose problems for clicking text, which may be big enough to read but not big enough to click. The issue is especially bad on websites—designed for clicking with a mouse—but apps are also problematic.

Touching and swiping are too error-prone. The screen doesn’t always respond the way you expect. When that happens, it’s too hard to figure out what you did. Without a back button, it’s impossible to return to where you were.

Has Apple fixed these problems in the newly-release iPad 2, with its dual cameras and speedier processor? Based on early reports, it has not.

Tampa personal injury lawyer Wendy Doyle, P.A. has assisted the CaseDetails editorial team in identifying topics of importance to readers of this blog.

Good search engine optimization (SEO) and an attractive design can only take your website so far. The most important part of any site is its content. Visitors may put up with minor inconveniences in a site that provides valuable content, but they’re unlikely to return to a beautiful site that offers nothing of value (or at least fun).

In her Web Site Usability Checklist, Larisa Thomason discusses how content can engage visitors and encourage them to come back for more.

Lead with the most important information: Web users have notoriously short attention spans, so you have to grab their attention right off the bat and then don’t let go. Make sure visitors can see your best content without scrolling. Check it in multiple browsers at several screen resolutions.

Present your content for skimmers: Most visitors aren’t interested in every word on the page, no matter how much time and effort you put into writing it. Make it easy for visitors to scan the page and pick out the information they came to find by using:

• Headings
• Bullet points
• Bold type
• Color
• Plenty of white space around everything

Don’t present text as an image: Not all visitors will see the image. They may have images turned off or the image may not load properly. Others may be using a screen reader, which can’t read inside an image. If your visitors can’t read your content, they’ll hit the “back” button quickly.

Use ALT text and TITLE attributes: All images should be tagged with both attributes. Make sure they provide useful information about the image and, if applicable, what it links to. Visitors using screen readers will find this especially useful.

Encourage visitors to explore and return by designing your website to provide valuable content in an engaging manner. Read more website usability checklists on branding and more in coming weeks.
Medical malpractice lawyers in NJ with Legome & Associates have assisted the CaseDetails editorial team in identifying topics of importance to readers of this blog.

Improve your website's branding with these design tips

When visitors come to your website, you want them to know it’s yours. You also want them to remember you later, when they’re ready to retain a lawyer. Good website branding can accomplish that for you.

In her Web Site Usability Checklist, Larisa Thomason provides layout and design tips to improve your website’s branding.

Be consistent: Your visitors should feel comfortable no matter where they navigate within your site. Elements of the page that should stay the same throughout your site include:

• The color scheme: Don’t use blues and greens in one section and suddenly switch to red and orange. Visitors may wonder if they’re still on your site
• Fonts: Pick a font or set of fonts (one for headers, another for body text and a third to use sparingly for emphasis) and stick with it.
• Page layout and navigation: Visitors want to know where to find page elements and navigation links. Most aren’t patient enough to play a guessing game, and your goal is to create an experience they’ll want to remember.

Use custom error pages: Visitors may try to go to a nonexistent page for any of a number of reasons. You may have moved it, an external link is wrong, the visitor mistyped the URL or the server hiccupped.

Instead of a generic 404 error or Page Not Found message, redirect this traffic to a useful, customized page. Design it with the same layout as the rest of your site and offer links for finding the right page. A link to your site map would be useful.

Have a memorable tagline: What makes you special and why should visitors choose your law firm over your competitors? Create a tagline expressing this idea and include it prominently on every page, possibly below your logo.

Always consider your branding when creating or redesigning your website. Stay tuned for other website checklists in coming weeks.

An NJ personal injury lawyer with Legome & Associates has assisted the CaseDetails editorial team in identifying topics of importance to readers of this blog.

When redesigning your website don't forget SEO

Are you looking to update your firm’s website? Don’t forget to consider SEO in your website redesign. Making your site user-friendly and appealing depends a lot on SEO. Mark Jackson, in an article on Clickz called Redesigning Your Website? Don’t Neglect SEO suggests the following.

Avoid common SEO mistakes by keeping these tips in mind:

Do Your Keyword Research. This sounds elementary, but it’s crucial to having your site perform well in SEO. Use keyword tools such as Google AdWords, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Consider looking at existing paid search campaigns for click-through rates (CTRs), time spent on site and conversion rates.

Determine How to Be Competitive. Choosing good keywords is only half the battle as only a few of them will be competitive. Figure out which ones are competitive by doing a Google search for your target keywords. Take the top-10 ranking sites and analyze them to look for content patterns, best practices, etc.

Build Your Information Architecture. This is an important SEO factor for website redesign. Make customers want to visit! Your site should be appealing, search engine friendly and have content that adds to the user experience.

Review Your History. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, right? SEO for website redesign requires that you determine where you were getting your traffic. Keep elements that were working for your firm in the new site.

Include Redirects. Use a 301 redirect from every page of the old site to the new site. If you can keep the same URL during the relaunch, great. If you can’t, however, your URL structure is going to change. The 301 redirect will automatically connect the user to the new site.

SEO for website redesign is key to the success of your site update. Figure out how to make SEO work for your firm’s new site. Keep checking in at CaseDetails.com for information on link building, adding video to your website and more!