Refreshing a Premier West Coast Law Firm's Website
Challenge
OVERVIEW Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP, has been a leading law firm in California since 1937. They have over 75 lawyers specializing in a variety of practice areas working in Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco. What started out as a platform migration turned into a migration with a design refresh.
Solution
Discovery Originally, Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP was primarily looking for a platform migration from their old, outdated CMS to Wordpress. Our plan was to take the existing code, transfer it, and integrate it into the Wordpress CMS. However, with such an outdated design we decided to present some refreshed designs to them to see if anything piqued their interest. In the end, Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP loved the modern designs we showed them, and they decided to not only switch platforms but to also do a complete design refresh. UX Strategy Our designs maintained the general content structure of Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP’s old website, all while conducting a serious redesign of each page. We focused on making the designs more modern, starting with increasing font sizes (to match current best practices), applying more spacing between sections (allowing for the website to breathe a bit better), and updating the imagery across the site. With some thoughtful cosmetic changes in place, we then took a look at the layout of each page and made some drastic structural updates. The homepage, for instance, went through some big changes during our design phase. The successes—articles that are related to what Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP had accomplished—were placed right at the top of the page, giving users direct access to what Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP is capable of. We also added an attorney search alongside some high level statistics such as the number of years Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP has been in business, how many lawyers they have working in their offices, as well as how many locations they have, showing users the true scale of the company. Additionally, on their old website, we noticed a gray sidebar that appeared on every page of the website that was sometimes utilized and other times just sat there, empty. We decided to only leave that bar on certain pages where relevant copy could be added to it (e.g. the attorney bio page) and remove it from those pages that didn’t utilize it. Build The labor-intensive part of the build process was migrating all the data from the old site onto the new one and integrating it into the Wordpress CMS. The process was complicated, requiring code cleanup for all of the insights, successes, attorneys, and practice area pages, and making sure that everything was correctly exported from the old CMS and imported into the new one. While building the new CMS, we also needed to make sure that the administrator could easily associate attorneys to publications and presentations, as well as related practice areas. In addition, we had to choose one professional to be the managing partner for a specific service or practice area, and then feature the other related professionals in an expandable section beneath the main contact. This required a great deal of development and testing to ensure the professionals were able to connect to their respective publications and practice areas. Test & Launch When testing the Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP website on the new platform, we needed to be sure that all of the internal links on the site were functional and working properly. We did a lot of thorough QA to ensure this, as well as double-checking that each of the professionals was related to their relevant practice areas, and that they were all associated with the proper insights and successes. Once we were confident that the new Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP site was functioning properly and contained all the data exported from the old site and imported to the new site, we coordinated with their IT team to get the site launched minimizing downtime.
Results
With Haight Brown & Bonesteel LLP’s new website and up-to-date CMS launched, they were ready to begin marketing their new website and sharing it with internal stakeholders, current clients, and prospective clients. By maintaining the general content structure of their old website, users weren’t caught off-guard trying to learn the flow of a completely different website. In addition, the cross-pollination of insights, successes, attorneys, and practice areas made the site incredibly enjoyable to browse.
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