Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal editor, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, marketing consultant, legal consultant, business development

I spoke recently with blogger and online marketing expert Joshua Fruchter of eLawMarketing about how his agency develops law firm websites using Drupal, one of the world’s leading free open-source content management applications powering websites such as whitehouse.gov.

A key advantage, explained Josh, is that Drupal brings the cost of a sophisticated website way down for law firms on a tight budget. With more than 11,000 free developer-contributed add-ons available as of August 2011 to add new features to Drupal’s core capabilities, “Drupal has a module for every function a law firm could want,” noted Josh. He estimated that a Drupal-powered website with multiple “bells and whistles” would cost less than $10,000.

Using Drupal also means that law firms no longer need to be locked into a developer’s proprietary system to which only the developer’s programmers have access. Instead, law firms using Drupal gain access to the collective “brain power” of a community of over 10,000 Drupal developers worldwide who are constantly working to refine and extend Drupal’s capabilities. See Drupal: A New Word in Law Firm Marketing

A critical feature of Drupal is its full support of key SEO best practices. Examples cited by Josh include:

• Editable, search engine-friendly URL’s that incorporate keywords, like this URL that incorporates key phrases related to a new law firm alert -- see http://bit.ly/quqPAG
• Screens that allow users to craft unique meta title and description tags for each and every page of a website.
• A checkbox to display links on the homepage to timely news items or publications, so that the home page is constantly refreshed with new content and more frequently spidered by Google and other search engines. See links on the home page eLawMarketing designed for Diserio Martin.

Other “power” features offered by Drupal:

• A contextual sidebar that displays links to content in a sidebar that is related to the content in the main body of a web page. For example, the sidebar on a lawyer bio page can include links to the lawyer’s practices, industry experience, articles and events. See the bio of Charles Spiess.
• Quick integration of buttons to easily share a page’s content via email, or on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and dozens of other online social networks.
• A calendar feature to easily create, date and manage events and news pages. See the Events page eLawMarketing created for the Rikleen Institute for Strategic Leadership.
• “Breadcrumb” navigation to allow visitors to navigate deeply into a topic and then easily retrace their steps back to their starting point.
• A module to build FAQ’s with questions that open and close accordion-style to display answers.

For interactivity on a homepage, Josh advises against using Flash, because it can’t be viewed on an iPad or iPhone. Instead, eLawMarketing mixes Drupal and JQuery to deploy Javascript slideshows that can be used to highlight success stories on a law firm’s homepage. See case studies featured at top of the homepage of EM Online Media.

Drupal makes life easy for marketers who update websites, offering them a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) view when they are editing their websites. The WYSIWYG view is accessible directly on each page after an administrator logs in.

If your website isn’t built in Drupal, it should be.