Fixing Website

I think we all can agree, everyone loves to chime in with an opinion on a website. A site is cool, it's slow, it has nice graphics, it's ugly, it's always updated or it's never updated, we've heard it all.

And opinions on the importance of a web site vary considerably also. Within many organizations, there's a longer than usual continuum with the “Our website needs to be top class” element perched on one end counterbalanced with the “Our website doesn't matter, we don't get clients that way” screaming their lungs out down the other side. This article is not intended to examine that phenomenon; we are merely acknowledging that it exists!

All of those end-user, client type of viewpoints being understood, one might think it's a no brainer that a law firm website has some strong technical management standing behind it. I don't think any well-intended professional would offer serious resistance against that viewpoint. But surprisingly, particularly in the organizational sense, this can be a more complex challenge than one might anticipate.

Why is this?

Well, the first bone of contention is almost always project ownership. Is the website a technology project, or a marketing/business project? In most law firms, rightly so I might add, it is considered a marketing function.

That's all well and good, but like many things in life, oversight on a function is not black and white. The reality is that appropriate law firm website management contains multiple management dimensions, which is probably the most important point of this article. So, to put this as simply as possible, a marketing department should own the website content while the technology function should own the website architecture and application.

Failure to understand this logical delineation of duties can lead to some disastrous results. Tipping the scale too much towards the technology arm can result in a well-functioning site with a message totally inconsistent with a firm's goals. On the other hand, if the marketing or business function takes a project like this and constructs a site, most commonly help of an external party, and it happens to have been constructed with inferior technologies, it is destined to have glitches, performance issues or other tech-based weaknesses.

The proper approach here is a partnership, with the marketing and technology functions each understanding their roles and responsibilities, maintaining proper boundaries on the effort, yet collaborating in a productive, team-oriented manner. Getting to that point, which is easier said than done, is job number one in law firm website management, in my view.

It is important to note that, in my opinion, these sorts of considerations are not certainly related to one particular project or even a few projects which I have worked on. Rather, I believe these are issues relating to the support of websites in general, if not into the broader world of all business applications. However, keeping within the scope of this article, within the website theater I've worked on many projects in my career, spanning areas like corporate websites, product sites, volunteer work in the educational field and e-commerce sites, in addition to law firm websites of course. I've also discussed these issues on many with other technologists relating to their projects which I have not worked on. These issues of project ownership and responsibility are, in my view, ubiquitous in nature.

However, assuming one can get to the end-point where business-people manage content and technologists manage applications, what are some of the key touchpoints for the technology function to help in the management of a well-functioning website?

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Management and Team Construction

To quote some famous infomercials, “Set It And Forget It” does not work for managing the underlying technology of a website. Bidding out a project to a consulting firm and letting the application sit there unchanged once completed is a less-than-ideal practice.

And I'm not speaking about content here—remember, that's a marketing function. What I am referring to are issues like tool versions, SSL certificates, security scans for those websites which are collecting information and even ensuring a site stays compliant with regulatory changes (think GDPR and cookies). A support team engaged to manage a website on a periodic basis is a strong practice.

Like most applications, a time will probably come when a law firm's website seems a bit sluggish or outright fails with an error message. When this happens, proper analysis is required.

What do I mean by that? I guess one way to say it is that application debugging or performance tuning is an art, not a science. Some serious expertise is usually required. Software development professionals understand that performance issues need to be examined looking at discrete factors such as the host/server environment, network considerations, application code or local workstation. Unfortunately, many “webmasters” with a bit of knowledge about HTML or graphic design don't typically have the skill set to assist in this area. So, as a technology leader responsible for a website, the vision here is to build a diverse team of multiple technologists to allow for different perspectives and ideas when working through improvement opportunities.

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Some Lessons Learned

Thus far, we've covered primarily organizational or structural approaches to technical website management. Let's now pivot and tick off some tactical strategies to work through these problems.

1. Vet Your Hosting Provider: All hosting providers are not the same. For example, WordPress might be considered one of the leading backbones for law firm websites. For this technology, certain companies, such as BlueHost or WordPress itself, are fundamentally superior hosting companies to some others in the marketplace. Quite literally, the same application code might run far more efficiently on a different hosting platform. Don't be afraid to pilot a site in a different location if performance is an issue.

2. Developer Tools: There are many tools out there to help a developer examine opportunities to improve a website. Google PageSpeed Insights is one of many great resources in this area. Using tools like this to help define issues is a great practice, they help root out issues with inefficient application code or unnecessarily large image sizes which might be otherwise exceptionally difficult to define.

3. Tool Versioning: Keep tools current. We all have read, ad nauseam, the myriad of articles constantly emphasizing the need to patch servers and workstations for security purposes. While you probably don't need to be that tyrannical about version upgrades on the tools used on a law firm website, being diligent on that front is certainly a good idea. Again, using the WordPress example, most non-technologists would probably be surprised how frequently the core WordPress Release changes, not to mention the versions of various plugins typically used on law firm WordPress websites. Those who fail to keep up to date on this front will, in time, see the word failure be applied to their website. And that's never a good thing!

4. Change Management: A law firm website is an application just like any other business application in an enterprise. Accordingly, there should be both a development and production environment, changes should be staged for review and approved, and a change management system should govern this process. Developers FTP'ing changes to a production website without technical or content review is a major no-no, don't allow that to happen. An appropriate amount of technology based management structure is often lacking on websites, but actually much needed.

5. Version Control: Last but not least, I strongly recommend the implementation of a code management and version control system for your law firm website application code. The most obvious option is Github, but anything will do. For all applications, I cannot overstate the importance of storing source code so a backup is available in the event of a catastrophe and making sure changes are tracked. This sounds obvious, but many times I have seen websites where one person has all the source code for a project stored only in one place, often a local machine. This is a recipe for disaster.

Kenneth Jones is Chief Technologist of Tanenbaum Keale LLP, a boutique litigation law firm and Chief Operating Officer of the Xerdict Group, a SaaS legal collaboration software company. Xerdict is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tanenbaum Keale.