The Challenge
As a successful mid-market law firm whose value proposition is to offer the excellence of legal advice and services expected of a large firm with the responsiveness and low-frills of a smaller firm, Ducker, Montgomery, Aronstein, & Bess sought to enhance the web presence of the firm in the same value-conscious manner they offer their clients.
The firm’s primary goals with their website redesign were 1.) to promote their attorneys as smart, approachable professionals, 2.) to enhance the user experience in a clean, fresh new design, and 3.) to end up with a site that was scalable and easy to manage. Secondary goals related to the user experience included such things as making it easy for users to find contact information for the firm or specific attorneys, making it easy for users to quickly navigate between the practice area specialties of the firm and the attorneys associated to each, and to give visitors valuable information about the firm’s practice areas and their unique approach to each.
The Solution
Ducker, Montgomery, Aronstein, & Bess selected Denver, Colorado digital agency Akavit to design, develop and deploy the firm’s new web site. Akavit’s team, in turn, selected Sitefinity as the scalable extensible easy-to-use platform of choice for the new Duckerlaw.com project.
Akavit’s technical team architected and developed the site on the Sitefinity CMS 3.5 platform and included a few custom modules to make administration easy. As a result, an internal administrator with little or no web experience can add firm practice areas and attorneys by simply filling in fields and uploading images. When a new attorney is added, the admin simply fills in the appropriate fields and uploads and image. The attorney’s information page is automatically displayed in a consistent way that enhances the solid user experience. And the new attorney is dynamically added into the filtered list found on each practice area page.
News & resources combined to ensure fresh information that showcases the firm’s expertise and involvement in their fields of practice.
The site creative brief was for a clean, solid, fresh look that would convey dependability and professionalism, and for a site architecture that would be easy to navigate. The first step we took was to arrange a photo shoot of all the attorneys in order to have images, which concurrently show the attorneys as both professional and approachable. These images were to become an integral part of the overall site design, and of the image of the firm. And the design comps were built around the imagery and style that now makes the firm’s web presence of which to be proud.
The Results
The firm now has a clean, professional easy-to-manage web site that showcases their value proposition and expertise. According to Marcus Squarrell, the law firm’s partner in charge of the website re-design, “the firm is pleased with the look and function of the site and intends to take advantage of the flexibility of the platform to add pages, links and features.”
“ Sitefinity is the perfect CMS solution for both Web Developers and End Users,” says Adam Baldwin, partner and VP of Architecture at Akavit. “For developers, it provides a framework that is both easy to learn and rich in functionality. For end users, it provides the most user friendly interface for maintaining your site on the market today. “