IT & the Lawyer

Common mistakes

In this wide ranging and informative article Patrick Della Valle highlights a number of common but flawed practices which seem to exist exclusively on web sites in the legal industry.

These include:
Article grouping - Too many articles on a single web page or all the articles dumped into a single linked file. This is a bad practice because it defeats the ability of web traffic analysers to answer a very useful question - who is using your website and what articles are being read?

Link apathy - the practice of providing a non-descript link to a page or file that contains more than one article. Anchor texts of articles should describe the article's content.

Hard copy mentality - lacunae borrowed from the printed medium, such as inexact dating articles must be dated, and dated accurately, as this allows visitors to rank information chronologically. Or Poor search functionality - try finding something which you know is there, but it cannot be found, try pulling your hair out at the same time.

Under the hood - a number of technical topics which nevertheless are of use, for instance, don't use massively long URLS, as an example the following is given, www.big-law-firm.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/newsletters.xtedslies/id_object/avelk2ad5e0-5031-4563-96f4-dad426d9a7cd.cfm . And of course JavaScript pop-ups, which are not spidered by search engines and which irritate users.

Remember, a greater increase in web site traffic = more potential clients.

Article on Law Practice Today


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