Project background

12CP came to us as they felt their previous website no longer represented them. It had outdated information, it was cluttered and the navigation wasn’t very clear for users.  They had been thinking for a long time about a new site, but had struggled to get their ideas down on paper or formulate a brief.

Through a series of guided workshops, we were able to tease out key insights into their audience, their areas of expertise and their ambitions for the website in terms of functionality.

Design

As part of the branding exercise, we expanded 12CP’s colour palette to introduce both neutral and vibrant shades which could be used throughout the website design. Their main colour had originally been a dark blue, which led us to introduce a lighter blue which brightened up the overall look and feel as well as white, grey and silver shades to give contrast on individual web elements.

Iconography

The team at 12cP work across a number of different specialisms, through from regulatory crime to local government and employment. We felt that having unique icons across the site would help visitors to be able to quick reference key areas of the website such as ‘Our People’. This was very important considering that one of the main uses of the website is people researching their Barristers and their individual expertise and specialist areas.

We opted for simple line icons which were easy on the eye to develop this concept. These were then used site wide to ensure consistency from page to page.

Content

12CP had a lot of content that needed to be shown on specific pages of the website. For example on the Barristers pages they wanted to show key information, specialisms, previous cases and so forth. We adopted best practices across all of the page layouts and structure to ensure they would work well for search, however we also spent a lot of time considering how the front end user would digest each of the content items.

Some of the things we implemented to help with content architecture included:

• Clear headings with short content snippets to help with skim reading and general accessibility
• Bold heading styles to support clear page structure
• Anchor links for each specialist area associated with each barrister
• Pulling through related content automatically onto pages (for example related cases onto the associated Barrister’s page)

Forms

Another challenge was the long form for the Pupillage application. All of the questions were required, so we couldn’t simply shorten the form, however we knew it needed to offer a better user experience. We decided to break this form down into a stepped form, which guided the user through different manageable stages, with clear guides as to how much was left to fill in. This helped to manage expectations while also stopping the form look intimidating.

SEO Optimisation

One of the final parts of the project was optimising the new website for search engines and setting up tracking.

12CP had enjoyed strong rankings for a number of keywords in the region and wanted this to be preserved in the migration over to the new website. We went through our tried and tested checklist (including things like 301 redirects, page titles, meta descriptions and more) to ensure that SEO performance remained strong.

We also helped with optimising their website content and implementing technical optimisations to ensure that the website had strong foundations from launch.

For the tracking, we used Google Tag Manager to set up conversion and behavioural tracking. This included aspects such as form submissions and emails, as well as scroll depth and use of the search tools.