Five Steps to reduce the potential new business your firm’s
website can generate.
Your firm finally has website published on the Internet for almost a
year now, and it really does not seem to be creating the results you
expected. To maintain the worthlessness of your website, be sure
these common Internet errors all pertain to your website.
For just a few hundred more in design costs, you used your website
designer’s advice and now have a ‘Flash’ entry page. Great flying
graphics, sound.,. It’s like a movie introduction.
Downside: Unless you are an entertainment specialist, these intro
pages can be a real turn-off, and very time consuming ...waiting for
it to load. Many search engines have a very difficult time indexing
heavily animated pages. With significance always placed on the entry
page’s content, this can, and has, caused sites to rank far down in
standings for your firm’s keywords.
To prevent extra spam email, you decided to just have your contact
information on your contact page. Plus, you followed your web
designer’s advice again, and instead of publishing your email
address, potential clients must fill out an on-line form for any
concerns.
Downside: It’s a good design idea to place your firm’s entire
contact information on each page of your site. You never know on
which page a potential client may enter your site. It's a good idea
to include this on EVERY page of your site in the same spot on the
web page. On-line inquiry forms are fine but should not be used to
the exclusion of your special email address. There are email
scrambler programs that prevent spammers from automatically taking
your email address from your website. As this occurs in the
background coding, the general visiting public will never know that
you’re protecting your email this way.
When sending out email messages do not include your name, business
name and contact information. People will easily recognize you by
your email address such as:
in a day! Make it easy for your prospects to instantly know who you
are or risk your message being "trashed". The preferred process here
is to set up a ‘signature’ file for your email program. Plus, this
signature file should include a hyper-link to your website. Here is
my signature file:
Fantastic idea using your free hotmail account for all your firm’s
email needs. You can access it from anywhere, it has a good spam
filter, and best of all, it’s free!
Downside: If you have your own domain address for your website, you
should also have been given email addresses personalized to that
domain address. Example: My website address is
www.websitetrafficbuilders.com. All of my staff have email addresses
that promotes our domain address every time we use it, such as john@websitetrafficbuilders.com
. It’s a turn-off for potential clients to see that you have an everyday, free mail account.
You were never really expecting much from the Internet so you found
a great deal by getting your firm listed in a ‘legal directory’
because they gave you a free website.
Downside: To be successful you must publish your web address on all
your printed matter. With a free website, whose site are you really
promoting? Plus, what happens if you decide not to maintain your
listing with this directory? Not only does a sub-domain website
address look cheap, such as www.xyzlegaldirectory.com/petterman-law-firm.htm,
they are almost impossible to gain meaningful search engine
standings from without resorting to pay per click search engines.
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