1.  Provide Useful Information

Visitors are prospective clients, and should understand the unique capabilities of your organization -- a list of staff credentials does not distinguish your team sufficiently from others. To demonstrate a depth of experience, provide information about knowledge that can help visitors understand their problems and how your organization would solve them. Topic guides, frequently asked questions, or client check lists are examples of information that is simple to create, and useful for visitors.

2.  Keep Your Site Current

Content that has not been updated for several months or more shows a lack of concern about your web site and how you interact with prospective clients. Keep the content up-to-date by providing current and timely information. Press releases or brief news articles about recent projects provide an excellent way to create fresh content for your site.

3.  Make Your Site Easy to Find

If you want your organization to be found by prospective clients, ensure that your web site will appear as high as possible in search engine rankings. Good rankings are a direct result of providing the information that interest people. However, rankings can be improved by how the pages of your web site are built, use of page titles and keywords, how the content is delivered to the web, and the number of links to your site. Good online publishing tools should help to implement  index and search characteristics. Hand-built web pages often lack the information needed by search engines to index and rank the pages correctly.

4.  Provide the Right Tools

Your web site should be easy for people to navigate and find information. A modern site should include navigation aids such as an easy-to-use menu and "bread crumbs" that indicate the current location on the site. A built-in search tool will help people find specific pages and documents using full-text and keyword searches, and support common document formats such as Adobe Acrobat(R) and Microsoft Word(R). People also find printer-friendly pages (without images or other graphics) as helpful to print and save useful information.

5.  Balance Design versus Content

An effective web site should promote the knowledge and experience of your organization. A web site that emphasizes the graphic design - complex images, animation, or other "flash" - will credit the graphic designers more than your team. Create a site that uses a professional and attractive design that allows the information to be the main attraction of your site. A balanced approach to design and content will promote a professional image and focus attention on the capabilities of the organization.

6.  Keep People on Your Site

People are looking for specific information - the more useful pages and documents that your web site provides, the less likely a visitor will browse elsewhere for this information. Links to other web sites are valuable resources, but use these to complement the information on your site. For example, your web site might provide a summary for clients, and link to additional background information. Otherwise, your organization's site will just be a temporary stopping point in a search for more useful information

7.  Publish!

Most of the intellectual capital of an organization resides in the practices that are used everyday in its work. Publish these documents as a way to provide useful information and attract prospective clients to your site. Your web site should make it easy to include documents and not just ordinary web pages. Support for documents should include application formats, such as Microsoft Word(R) or Adobe Acrobat(R)

8.  Make it Accessible for Everyone

Too many web sites use graphics for navigation, and prescribe page layout and font size. This approach does not allow disabled or elderly visitors to easily read the site. An organization can demonstrate its commitment to serving a range of clients by supporting improved accessibility. A well-designed web site should accommodate text-to-speech browsers, alternate navigation styles, scaling of fonts, and other techniques for accessibility. These characteristics do not require a plain, unattractive design, only attention to the detail of how pages are built.

9.  Keep it Working

Your web site should be easy to run, which requires a robust and dependable infrastructure. Unless your firm can afford an information technology staff and the necessary computing hardware and software, the operations of your web site should be supported by a company that specializes in hosting web applications. An Internet Service Provider or ISP can provide reliable and inexpensive service for a monthly fee. To guarantee that your web site is available and can be updated, ensure that your online publishing tools can also be hosted by the ISP.

10. Make it secure

There are simple ways to secure information on a web site -- make sure that your web site supports basic tools such as page encryption. These features will ensure that staff and visitors feel confidence in using your web site and its contents. If your web site includes sophisticated tools for secure document sharing, subscribing to an email newsletter, purchasing reports, signing up for law seminars, or other e-commerce features than web site security is essential. A web site should include features such as user login and secure payments.

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Word is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.