The latest edition of Attorney at Law Magazine just hit newstands. In my article this month, I talk about the critical function web developers have in the website creation process. These are the folks that do the critical, behind the scenes work that make a website functional. Helping me with the article was Nate Kennedy, a senior web developer at FindLaw.
What You Don’t See Can Make a Critical Difference
When you look at a website, you can see the design and the content. If you have been involved in creating your law firm’s website, you probably notice the keyword phrases in the title tags and throughout the copy.
But there’s an essential task that ties all those elements together and makes a website work in just about any browser, on many different computers and mobile devices, and for people with disabilities. Website developers make it all work the way it’s supposed to.
One of the great resources we have at FindLaw, the company I represent, is a team of experienced, dedicated developers. Our developers – technically known as web producers – do not do this as a small part of their jobs. It’s their full focus 40 hours a week — and they’re good at what they do.
Anybody can build a website, right? There are companies that can take your design and your content and have your site up and running tomorrow. Believe me, it won’t work the way you expected it to. There’s no assurance it will display correctly each time on any computer using any major browser.
No matter how low the cost of overnight development, it isn’t worth it.
“A law firm’s website is the 24/7 face of the firm,” says Nate Kennedy, a senior web producer at FindLaw. Nate and all the members of the development team keep that in mind as they develop more than 2,500 websites a year.
The team stays current with industry trends, best practices and accepted industry standards. They make sure the sites they develop are user friendly (including disabled users) and meet the criteria of the major browsers. They know that clean, understandable code makes sites more accessible to users – and more readable by search engines.
From day one, technology makes the process seamless. When a customer talks to a FindLaw team (project manager, writer, designer, search consultant), the information for the website is already being placed in a sophisticated, proprietary tool. The site map is created within the tool, and all writing and search marketing notes on the call are entered into the tool. The site is written, copyedited and sent to the law firm — all using our publishing tool.
After the customer has approved the content, it is sent to development — still within the writing tool. By not bringing information in from various tools and sources, there is less chance of error and confusion.
Web producers pull the elements together. They make the website happen. They get the approved design and specs from the designer and the approved content from the writer and make it all work together.
The design needs to be coded so that it looks and operates the way the designer intended. While dropping in the site map and content is largely an automated function, it always requires the skilled eyes of a web producer to see that every element is where it belongs, that all the parts mesh as planned.
Then the quality assurance (QA) process begins. The producer runs the new site through several different browsers to make sure it works in all of them. Though the site has been thoroughly spellchecked and copyedited, they run another spelling check. They look at the print view for each page of the site. They check the links and fix any broken links. They make sure all the customer’s products were fulfilled.
But wait, there’s more. After all that QA, the site’s web producer sends the site to another group for what is called “first impressions.” A fresh set of eyes goes through a checklist of items for one more check to ensure the site works properly. Only then does the working site get sent to the customer who has an opportunity to review the site before it goes live.
Nate Kennedy tells me that he and the other web producers – as well as the members of the first impressions team – take pride in developing sites that meet industry standards and customer expectations. Even after a site is live, as long as it is serviced by FindLaw, the team is available to make changes.
This is just part of the professional team that backs up every FindLaw site I sell. If you want to know more about FindLaw or simply want to talk about legal websites, you are always welcome to call me. I represent FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters business. We develop websites for lawyers and no one else.