The Challenge
The Morris Law Group is a 50-year old personal injury law firm dedicated to getting the fairest possible settlement for persons injured in automobile accidents, slips and falls, and other unfortunate mishaps. The personal injury landscape is a very competitive space and, from an online perspective, requires a website that is intuitive and easy to use, ranks well in search engines and is constantly updated with fresh and relevant content. Previous to our Sitefinity implementation, The Morris Law Group website was static and had difficulty ranking in the major search engines. Administration was also very clunky and complicated to maintain consistency and error-free code. Our objective with the redevelopment was to build a robust, scalable solution that offered the Morris Law Group an online platform to properly advertise their successful history of representing clients in all type of personal injury claims while easing the administrative burden of website maintenance.
The Solution
Cubicle Fugitive is a client focused marketing firm, meaning we try to build websites that speak to a firm’s target audience and with Sitefinity we knew we had a platform that offers a variety of tools that enhance our ability to tell a firm’s story while providing ample functionality and interactivity. The instinctive use of Masterpages for templating eases the common rift between designers and developers, letting each focus on what they do best, and the out-of-the-box integration with jQuery and RadControls lets our UI experts build simple, intuitive navigation and user interface elements with minimal effort.
Having worked with Sitefinity for several years now, choosing the CMS for this project was the quickest decision made. Out of the box, we knew Sitefinity offered a lot of features needed to run a successful law firm website including centralized news and events modules, a fully customizable documents module for case law and recent publications, as well intuitive content management controls. Also, because Sitefinity is so customizable, we were quickly able to build a profile management section to enable the firm to edit and manage their lawyer biographies from a central source.
Finally, because the Sitefinity interface provides ample options for search engine optimization techniques – from direct management of page names and semantically built navigation controls to page by page meta tag access and straightforward URL rewriting abilities – we were able to ensures each page received the level of attention necessary to achieve high page rank in the likes of Google, Bing, Yahoo among others.
The Results
Sitefinity provides the tools to make every site a success. For The Morris Law Group, the initial reaction has been extremely positive and customer contact (the most important metric of any site redevelopment) has been increasing steadily since launch. As the original personal injury site’s pagerank slowly fades from Google, to be replaced with this new client-friendly, search-engine-friendly website, the first month numbers speak directly to the website’s successful relaunch:
| Metric | Increase/Decrease |
| Visits | 38% increase |
| Pageviews | 47% increase |
| Average Time on Site | 7% increase |
| Bounce Rate | 29% decrease |
The original Morris Law Group website was static with no interactivity. Migration to the Sitefinity platform, with all the inherent complexities of dynamic data, flash integration, high quality photos, and increased structural and functional intricacies, did not affect performance in the least which is a testament to the effort the Sitefinity team spends on code optimization and best practice development.
Being both the developer and the designer of the Morris Law Group website, we see the clear benefit of Sitefinity as a platform for law firm content management systems and legal and lawyer website design. Our development time has been cut in half since moving our core CMS business to the Sitefinity CMS. Designers can focus on design and developers can focus on functionality. And when all is said and done, integration is a breeze and deployment is quick and painless.
Overall, The Morris Law Group is pleased with the results and we’re happy to continue to promote the Sitefinity platform as the best choice for law firm web development and law firm content management.