The Internet as an Effective Tool

[Cristina M Robeck]

You need to be alive on the web now-a-days to even make it to the first hand shake with a potential client. That first hand shake is where all of us small business owners want to be. The web is a fast growing world that has changed and evolved over the last few years. It is driven by need and want: your need to be known and a potential client’s desire to hire you.

In the past you needed to have a high end dynamic website that allowed for you, the user to maintain it and your client to think it was professional, loaded with information and flashiness. Those days are not necessarily gone just changed up a bit. For small to mid size businesses I will always recommend custom websites that fit their need and budget. These sites range from $10,000 - $15,000 for an informational site with custom graphics, photos galleries, user content management, user control panels, ready optimization connection and more. These high end sites still are the best way to move if your company is growing and you are doing a marketing push.

These sites are still the best value for your time and money. They allow you to brand yourself in a unique way that will set you apart from your competition. Unfortunately in the legal industry we have not seen a good display of web site use. Even large firms are not maximizing their use of the internet. There are few larger firms that look great online but looking great and having great content that is helpful to your client are two different things. The purpose for a website is to inform your potential client and to give your current clients a place to continually get up-to-date information. The legal industry needs help to get themselves up on the web and into networking places other than a board room. Your clients are on the web looking for you and they are coming across web cards, yahoo self built sites or nothing at all. The bottom line here is that you do not have to be a huge law firm to create a dynamic site where your clients feel comfortable to enter and then meet you.

The legal field was not the only field that was finding it hard to catch up to the internet or advertising themselves online. Helistream, a helicopter flight school & charter, and Carrillo, manufacture for custom connecting rods, in the past two years have given themselves a makeover both on the web and in print as they saw that their clients were demanding online information. Both these sites range from $13,000 - $14,500. They are complete informational sites, user can keep content fresh, they can upload their own photos, track links to their site, are optimized ready, have custom graphics, but are build on the exact same platform, which owned by our client and can host and move the site to where ever they please. They have custom photography, have e-Newsletter capabilities, can house their client’s contact information, downloads, and much more. Each one is unique in their needs to run their company.

A second solution is the mid range template sites, that have been keeping up with the times. Although there are some limitations we have built and seen some great template sites. Do not be turned off to these sites. They are not as hard to work with as you think but we do encourage our clients to seek help when building them. These sites are in the range of $100 (do it yourself) to about $3500 with help and better platforms. When people hear the word template they go back to the 1990s version of template sites, each one looking and saying exactly the same thing. This is not the case anymore. In fact we have seen a long number of companies begin to use these sites for start ups and just getting themselves on the net in a presentable way.

There are many tools out on the net that have done a great job of creating these sites. I would recommend: Squarespace, Wordpress, Jubla and Magneto. Squarespace and Wordpress are slightly easier to use and if you are tech savy I am sure you can figure them out. Jubla and Magneto are more cumbersome and if you are not good with design and some coding I would suggest hiring a developer to help you out. The great thing about these sites is that you can maintain them, and you can put your own graphics in them, making them look more custom than template.

Lastly there are no free sites out there worth even wasting your time on. You should try and invest anywhere from $3000 + to have a presentable site especially in the legal arena. There are too many bad legal sites on the web that have given themselves bad names that you really do not want to be lumped in with. You know that you want your business card to stand out amongst the rest. Think of your website as your new business card.

Once you have established yourself with a website you need to look into a Facebook account, where you create a personal account but have a fan page made for your business. This is a great place to post articles, newsletters and put testimonies from your clients. You can twitter your updates for your fan page and it is always a great idea to have videos made that can inform your clients of what you are doing. You can do this by downloading an inexpensive app onto your computer, like Gold Pro, and making your pictures come alive with some text and music. These videos could be of a conference you attended, your team or your firm. The more you spend on these few tools the farther you will get with free advertising. Facebook is now the one place where business and your personal life become one. It is something you have to embrace and embrace it well. Keep your FB account from becoming just a social networking place; make it a place where you gain your clients trust.

Finally these are my professional opinions and my firm has advised many many clients over the years in the fast growing world of the internet. We have advised our clients in the trends but more importantly we have advised on how to use the internet to grow their business. Some have been start-ups and some have been large companies, all wanting the same thing, to make themselves known and grow their business.

Article written for Orange County Bar Association Solo/Small Firm Section

Article by:
Cristina Robeck is the owner of Robeck Design. She designs websites for small to large businesses and helps businesses develop their branding through graphic design, such as logo, letterhead, brochures, and business cards.

You can call Cristina at
[phone], view her website at
www.robeckdesign.com, or reach her via
e-mail at cmrobeck@robeckdesign.