Last month, Gowlings unveiled its new online look. With the launch of this latest incarnation of its website, the firm joins the growing legal-world trend toward an increased use of Flash elements and clean, uncluttered homepages. The site’s substantial content offering is accessed from a no-nonsense vertical navigation menu along the left side.
There’s a lot of material on the site, and finding ways to present it in an organized and attractive fashion was no doubt a challenge. Dianne Rychlewski, a marketing consultant with the firm, gave us an inside look at how it was put together.
What were your key goals in developing this version of the site?
Having an online presence these days has never been more important. A successful website is one that not only succeeds in attracting and retaining clients, but appeals to potential prospects, law students and the internal professionals and staff as well. That said, before we did anything with our website it was important to first sit down and decide exactly what we wanted our website to “do” and what it should “say.”
Our first step was understanding the reasons behind the creation of the site, and how it ties in with our overall firm business goals and the value Gowlings can offer. We identified our strengths and developed innovative ways to highlight them on the web. It was important that our website reflect the overall vision and direction of our firm. Another very important goal was knowing our target audience and ensuring we provide value, thought leadership and easy and innovative ways of providing information.
In defining our goals, we wanted to ensure that the site was impactful, scalable and sustainable and, of course, “spider friendly.”
How long did it take to conceive and build?
The entire website was built in-house by our dedicated team of web developers who worked in close collaboration with the Gowlings marketing team and our external design consultants. Building the website from scratch gave us complete control over the building process and allowed us to achieve important efficiencies in data management. While the design was conceptualized in 2008, our building efforts did not begin in earnest until mid 2009 (about a year before release).
What was the inspiration behind the tic-tac-toe-board flash element?
The “nine box” image is a key element of our new brand. You will notice this element being used consistently in our design and marketing vehicles, and carried throughout all our materials in some way, including in our brochures, advertising, websites, and in our eMarketing components. As we all know, the introduction of Flash has changed the face of the Internet and many leading website development experts say Flash is the “Innovation of the Decade.” We had key firm messages to communicate on our home page and rather than too many words, decided that Flash would be a powerful way to do so and a great way to bring new life to our website.
Some people are just totally opposed to movement on websites. How would you respond to someone who finds the flash component distracting and extraneous?
There needs to be a balance when it comes to Flash on a website — using too much Flash can be a detriment to the user experience and search engine optimization. However, we built ours with functionality that would allow the user to bypass or stop it at any time. We also kept the transitions short and chose graphic images that were simpler, yet had a strong impact.
This is a pretty massive website. Was navigability a challenge during the wireframing and design process? What solutions did you arrive at to make the site easier to navigate?
We felt it very important to provide visitors with as much relevant information as possible; the challenge was to do so without overwhelming them with content. To achieve this, the design phase was an iterative process. The first challenge was to decide the main “sections” of the site. These sections remained relatively constant throughout the design and building process (although the final naming of the sections changed many times). Once the sections were determined, we spent significant time discussing the relationships between the content within the sections. This is where proper database design is paramount to ensure that content management does not become an overwhelming task.
Simplicity and ease-of-use was the key objective. On a number of sites you must spend long minutes navigating through the various web pages before finding the link that takes you to the information or services offered. Our goal was to make our site easy to navigate and to quickly get the user to the information they require.
The site includes secure areas for firm members and clients. What kinds of online solutions are available in this area?
Gowlings is one of the only full-service Canadian law firms to implement a national electronic case management platform known as electronic litigation services. This system provides a distinct advantage to our clients by enhancing document control, strengthening security and improving accessibility.
Gowlings works together with clients to extend existing collaborative efforts and continually deliver new and innovative solutions, including:
- Gowlings Hosted Due Diligence Sites — Virtual data rooms provide a faster, more productive and more efficient way to complete due diligence. Our secure Extranets streamline the entire process without the need to engage third-party hosting services.
- Board Extranets — Gowlings assists businesses to improve their corporate governance practices, reduce risk and improve decision efficiencies. To support our clients’ efforts in this area we have developed a tailored Extranet offering that provides secure online facilities to collect, distribute and archive board material.
- Uniform Document Extranets — A secure Gowlings Extranet that efficiently and reliability disseminates uniform documents to law firms and legal counsel across the country.
These offerings extend the firm’s client technology portfolio which also includes secure client access sites for litigation support, IP portfolio management, corporate records management, and mortgage portfolio management.
How well-utilized has the knowledge centre been so far? What’s been the most-accessed piece of content in that area?
The Knowledge Center, a resource for our clients and visitors, is one of the most visited pages of the websites. The most accessed pages are the various articles and presentations authored by our professionals. We also have had high traffic to our recent podcast series called Trendwatch.
Some firms are doing a lot of blogging these days. Any plans for Gowlings to launch a blog or two?
Blogs can be a great resource and a quick method for gathering information. We have had great success with internal wikis and various blogs for quite some time. Although we are currently focussed on delivering value via our website we do have plans for developing a blog strategy.