Clausen Miller PC »
Based in Chicago, Clausen Miller is a full service law firm with 175 attorneys practicing in five U.S. offices and London, England. The firm counsels clients on a broad range of commercial, litigation, insurance and liability issues.
Problem
The Clausen Miller website was dated, inconsistent with their marketing collateral and incapable of presenting their services or offering the interactive functionality the firm desired. Long pages failed to highlight content instead burying valuable information out of the reach of visitors. Although they produced some bold and interesting marketing collateral, their site wasn’t living up to their reputation.
What they wanted was a website that reflected the firm’s breadth of services provided through their practice areas and industries. They also wanted to make their featured publication, the CM Report, more prominent, establish processes for monitoring how visitors are reading the Report and whether or not they are returning to the site. They also wanted a site that could be easily updated by in-house staff without cost or delay.
Clausen had interest in a proposal builder as well as email marketing. They wanted to be able to leverage the content that was already loaded onto the website and grant access to attorneys and staff who needed to generate emails and proposals quickly and easily.
Solutions
- Design: Duo created a sophisticated, contemporary design that complemented the firm’s marketing materials. Clausen hired a photographer to take pictures of attorneys and staff in the Clausen environment. The dynamic images enhance the text content on the site and can be found throughout. Duo designed four Flash movies emphasizing the brand message and utilizing their bold new photography. The Flash movies load randomly upon browser refresh.
- Information Architecture: Duo re-organized the content to improve navigation and make the site scalable to anticipate growth and minimize website lifecycle costs.
- Content Management: A new content management system (CMS) made it possible for multiple users in different departments to add or change content. The human resources and marketing staff, in particular, immediately realized improved efficiency in addition to greater capability. With the new CMS, staff update job openings, receive resume applications, post event registrations and solicit newsletter subscriptions.
- Proposal Builder: The Duo Proposal Generator feature allows users to produce editable Word documents, utilizing existing content on the site as well as special proposal-specific content that is stored in the CMS but not visible on the public site. Clausen can grant access to authorized user for just the proposal generator, without allowing them to change site content.
- Email Marketing: Clausen selected ExactTarget, a Duo partner and email service provider, for their permission-based email newsletters. ExactTarget allows them to create, manage, send and track targeted emails, driving valuable traffic to their site. By integrating the email system with the CMS, Clausen is now able to reuse and repurpose content that is on their website by putting it in their emails as well.
- SEO: The Duo CMS permits each page of the website to be uniquely populated with keywords, key phrases and page-specific meta data that is essential for driving prominence in search engines. Keyword research was conducted to identify the phrases Clausen’s targeted audiences use to search for what they offer. Clausen content editors were then trained on managing and maintaining this system. With the new content rich pages indexed in search engines, search referrals based on the researched keyword phrases provide a substantial portion of qualified website traffic.
- Content, content, content: Duo’s development process permitted Clausen to load content into the CMS even as the website was still being built. By the time the visible part of the site was completed, the CMS database was largely populated with a large volume of real content. When the site was staged for preliminary viewing, Clausen was able to view and evalute it with actual content. This not only helped to confirm the design and architecture but permitted any formatting issues to be caught before site release. The end result was faster time to launch with less time and money spent on revisions.
Results
- New design reinforces the firm’s brand identity, the firm’s history and the uniqueness and varying personalities that make up their attorneys and staff.
- Intuitive navigation improves usability for site visitors.
- Content, once hidden, moved out of the shadows and became more visible to site visitors
- Referral traffic from search engines is both larger and more qualified based on a closer match between the phrases visitors search for and the content that populates the website
- New content management system makes it simple and efficient for in-house users to update content. The tools also make it easy for User Managers to manage other users.
- Improved information architecture permits flexible association of attorneys with practices and industries, as well as news, events and publications. This increases the likelihood that qualified visitors will take a positive business action such as reaching an attorney.
- Proposal generator allows attorneys and staff to generate proposals from content readily available on the site thereby minimizing researching and rewriting already existing content
- ExactTarget email allows the firm to produce customized e-newsletters for their target audiences permitting them to communicate their value in a more timely, targeted way
- Professionally managed hosting insures site performance and reliability, while also providing actionable site visitor behavior metrics
