Doar Rieck Kaley & Mack returned as a client of DLS Design following a brief period being served by one of the law industry’s mass-market web design vendors. Clients who’ve turned to DLS report they weren’t satisfied with their old website, citing a turnkey product delivered at a high price. Two examples of other firms that turned to us can be seen here and here.
We’ve also noticed this vendor sharing formats and styles among multiple firms; pages characterized by poor navigation with overstuffed layouts; and pages written in “search engine speak”. For Doar, their homepage used an odd, irrelevant tag line, and a baffling image as if from a speeding car.
We restored a direct tagline we originally wrote, describing the firm’s mission and services, and removed multiple, non-useful blurbs they had sprinkled across the page.
We retained elements from the site such as color and fonts, to provide a sense of continuity. The vendor employed a logo we designed for Doar earlier, and we were delighted to revive it.
While the mass-market provider did furnish substantive-sounding blog articles, which we retained, a close examination seemed to show similar articles appearing on other firms’ websites.
Among the most glaring deficiencies with the prior site was the lack of any direct communication through its pages.
Neither email links nor submissions through a contact form went to anyone at the firm.
Instead, these went through the vendor. Separately, the vendor furnished a special phone number for tracking purposes, but the client reported getting few calls through it.
The client also noted being unaware of how to edit their old site; with DLS, clients are trained to log in and make changes with ease.
Most inexplicable was the prior website’s complete omission of an Attorneys link; no landing page either.
This goes counter to our long experience on law firm sites: the attorney bios get the most traffic. It may also explain why the bios were never indexed by Google.
Our version of the site was finished in under 60 days, enabling us to go live when the prior provider’s contract ended.
Read more about the revival of the logo we designed for Doar.