Your team at IMS hopes that the first time you see your new estate planning and Elder Law firm website, you’ll be delighted. You may notice the absence of some features that you see on other websites—sliders, popups and autoplay—and wonder why they’re not on your IMS website. We don’t use them, for a number of reasons.
Popups: the little boxes that open up while visitors are on a website. We find them a bit annoying when we are on websites, and the last thing you want to do is annoy your visitors. Popups are used to gather email addresses, in exchange for a coupon or discount or a white paper. Your website is designed to serve as a means of engaging visitors with useful information, not merely gather email addresses. We pass on popups!
Sliders eat page loading time, which can harm performance and SEO rankings. Sliders do look cool, and on some websites they are a necessary feature, but for our purposes, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. They take a while to load, and those few additional seconds may send your visitors off to another estate planning law firm website. Some sliders move in ways that are challenging for older eyes, and others, where the sliders move one way and the backgrounds move another, can create a real visual hardship. Our goal is to create a positive experience for your visitors and keep the Google bots happy.
Autoplay is exactly that: a video that begins playing when the user opens your website. Is this not the most annoying thing in the web world? We think so. For users who keep their monitor volume on all the time, a video that opens automatically and starts playing loudly is a massive distraction. If you are looking at your phone in the office, do you want your colleagues to hear a message about estate planning?
Just because a website can do something does not mean it works. Every year brings more features and functionality to websites, all of which are carefully evaluated for our clients. Remember that we base our decisions on what to use and what not to use on hard data, not what’s cool or trending. That supports our ultimate goal: building websites that grows estate planning and Elder Law practices.