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Webinar Recap and Recording: Law Firm Blog Technology Mistakes

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September 16, 2015

Earlier today, we were live on our Top 10 Online Technology Mistakes webinar.

In case you missed it, Joshua Lynch (our Director of Product Management) went into detail around just how risky some law firms are when it comes to their use of blog and website technology.

Josh’s insights clarified things to absolutely avoid in order to be in full legal compliance with your online presence. Other tips focused on elements of a bad user (potential client) experience and how this can kill any chance of earning new business.

The full webinar recording, recap summary, and associated slides are below. We hope you take a look (pro tip: click the arrows within each embed to expand to full screen).

I also pulled together some of the cool stats and quotes Josh shared:

  • Just 10% of Am Law 200 firm websites currently use SSL and only 1% of Am Law 200 blogs use SSL (Am Law Report Webinar 2015)
  • 47 percent of people use passwords that are at least five years old! (TeleSign)
  • WordPress power 59% of all websites on the internet (Dashburst)
  • 83% of hacked WordPress installs were not running the latest security release (WPBeginner)
  • 33% of Am Law 200 blogs have no mobile approach at all (Am Law Blog Benchmark Report 2015)
  • The average person in the U.S. looks at their phone 150 times a day (KPCB)
  • 52% of users say a bad mobile experience makes them less likely to engage with a company (Google)

Putting blogs under the firm website risks stifling the personality of the website and of the lawyers who are blogging. […] Developing a blog’s readership is difficult at the best of times and will be more difficult within the confines of a firm website.
Steve Matthews, President of Stem Legal

  • The U.S. CAN-SPAM Act requires all email notifications for blogs (or other commercial email) contain a physical postal address (FTC CAN-SPAM Act)
  • A mishandled site or blog migration can devastate a well-established site’s traffic by 65% (Half Dome Partners)

On Security:

  1. Make sure to secure your blogs for not only your users and authors, but readers as well using SSL encryption.
  2. Avoid “pluginitis” on your site as they are often a point of vulnerability to hackers.
  3. Remember to update not only your platform, but plug-ins if they are installed.LexBlog works off a revolving update schedule so when WordPress updates, we ensure our blogs are updated quickly after as well.

On Infrastructure:

  1. There is a big difference between hosting and managed hosting – make sure your provider includes support, security, stability, speed, as well as scale for your sites.
  2. Also how does your software enable or dis-enable the purpose of your blog or website? Make sure the two align for ease of use.
  3. We’ve all seen a blog within a website, but to truly have a stand alone publication which builds credibility and is easily shareable, having a blog outside of a website is key.
  4. Along with that, make sure to have well branded subscriber email notifications which follow the CAN-SPAM act as well.

On Tactics:

  1. For SEO, focus on writing great content that your target audience wants to read as well as citing and linking to influencers vs. obsessing over analytics, keywords and ranking.
  2. Be careful with migrating your sites to avoid downtime, broken URLs, error pages, and search engine penalties.
  3. Lastly, spend time on your title tags! Make sure your provider provides custom title tags with a solid structure to comply with search engines. Our Account Managers here at LexBlog spend lots of time developing custom title tags for each blog that launches with us.


Webinar Image Credits:

Blog post header image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User drestwn.

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