Introduction

Spring 2018  |  Duration: 3 weeks

Design Problem:

The client stated that people outside of the Miami area are not finding the site. The website needs to get more traffic from different cities to increase customers for those law offices. The client already has a SEO consultant but wanted a UX designer to propose a solution.

Current Website Evaluation:

• Over abundance of “calls to action” ex: Call now!
• Too much information 
• Need for organized information architecture (Navigation)
• Each page has various phone numbers listed 5 times

Summary:
Much of the content on the homepage is repetitive. The homepage should be a brief overview of
the content the customer might find throughout the website with unique calls to action. It is all about flow. The homepage is the first impression. The company might be better suited with a more fitting main image like a generic law photo. The one currently shows a particular location which is something I would advice staying away from to increase customer engagement from other locations. It would also be fitting to change the tag line “An Experienced Family Attorney.” The customer expects the attorney to be experienced. A more fitting tag line may have something to do with the following line which speaks about pricing. For example “Afforable Florida Family Attorney.” There is a typo in the subtitle as well. There is a small slider in the header portion of the page. This should either become a large slider inside the page or be eliminated. Motion draws the eye but in this case it becomes quite distracting.

PROJECT NAVIGATION

Research    |   Ideation    |   Summary  

Research

SEO Recommendations, Market Comparison

SEO Recommendations

Based on SEO forums around the web I have collected information on whether to have one large main website or have many little one to drive traffic from different locations.

Reference

Having One Central Website

"Advantages: Brand consistency can be maintained more easily, so the franchiser retains full control over what is published under their brand’s name. Combined strength. This is very important in the eyes of Google as the search giant moves its emphasis even more in the direction of brands and brand mentions. The websites for the better known companies will outrank the websites for smaller businesses (something which works in the favor of franchises). As a result, the more content you maintain under the one domain name, the stronger your website becomes.

Disadvantages: The franchiser is responsible for the digital marketing. This can be an issue without a strong, coherent strategy. It can also put off some potential franchisees if they perceive the online marketing efforts as being weak, and they’re unable to take the initiative due to the restrictions placed upon them by the franchise agreement."

Allowing Franchisees to Have Their Own Websites

"Advantages: This puts the emphasis firmly in the hands of the franchisee, allowing them to invest (as they see fit) in their own digital marketing, taking the concern away from the franchiser.

Having one website targeted solely to a specific geographic location could become more relevant in Google’s eyes.

Disadvantages: Brand consistency is harder to maintain, as the franchiser is not in control of what is published online in their name. Mistakes could be made, and these could be costly. This will work against the less technically savvy and those who just want to run their franchise, and could put them off signing with the franchiser in the first place. Having multiple domains for each franchisee will divide the strength of the franchise network, and reduce the overall strength of the main website."

Resource Take Aways

While the law clinic would not have different people maintaining each site (in theory), these are valuable things to propose to the client for an informed decision.

Reference 2 

SEO Advice: Make a web page for each store location

“If your company has a bunch of store locations, please don’t hide that information behind a search form or a POST. If you want your store pages to be found, it’s best to have a unique, easily crawl-able url for each store. Ideally, you would also create an HTML sitemap that points to the web pages for your stores (and each web page should have a unique url). If you have a relatively small number of stores, you could have a single page that links to all your stores. If you have a lot of stores, you could have a web page for each (say) state that links to all stores in that state.”

“You should provide a web page for each store–that lets anyone on the web find your store locations more easily.”

*This is not however saying to make entirely new websites per location

Resource Take Aways

Have a unique URL for each location which the site already does. Do not use the “find a location” tool. Do not make another website per location.

Conclusion: Based on Google’s web strategy one large website with good content will show up higher on the list thus driving more traffic to the site.

Solution: Have separate facebook pages for each location. This will drive traffic to the main website and target specific geographic locations.

Refine the main website to make it easier to navigate.

On the market

Quinn Emanuel Trial Lawyers

has a clean easy to use site. There is little clutter and limited calls to action. There are 5 straight to the point options in the navigation bar. The locations are easy to see and create visual interest.

The middle image shows two tasteful ways to get the customer to contact. The contact box is clean and straight to the point. The call to action in the top right is easy to read and carefully placed to draw the correct amount of attention. The below image shows wonderful imagery to let the customer preview what that page might be about. This is a great strategy for clarity.

Ideation

Site trees, Site maps, Mock-ups

Summary

Review of the project

UI elements

I worked with several people and asked them to navigate the current site. The findings in the evaluation section of this document touch on many things I discovered through that exercise.

Main findings:

1. It was hard to decide what they should do first

2. They felt overwhelmed by the clutter

3. There were too many options to chose from under practice areas

4. “Why are there two divorce options? Are they different”

Refinement lasted about a week which is where I created designs, tested them with people, then changed and tweaked based on feedback. It was critical to design something clean, readable, and straight to the point. These were my goals throughout the project.

recommendations

I was hired to advice the company and this is what I sent them:
It seems as though the site needs revitalization. With necessary changes I believe that you will increase customer response by 10%. There is back-end SEO work to get the main pages of each location to show up in the specific areas. Once the location pages get cleaned up you should draw much more traffic to the company. The designs I created are suggestions based on user experience research. The main point of this PDF is to show you your two options for solving the problem. My research leans towards creating a more powerful successful page and driving traffic to it. I recommend creating unique facebook pages per location that then drive traffic to the main site. This gives an extra layer of marketing. Facebook is great at algorithms and location based suggestions.