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How things can change. In our 2004 survey of the websites of the 20 largest law firms in UK, Eversheds was pushed into joint fourth position by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith and Beachcroft Wansbroughs. One year on, and thanks to unbeaten usability and design scores, Eversheds has trumped all its competitors’ websites so far reviewed in this column to become the current front-runner.

Headline scores in detail:

. Eversheds scored 88.7% overall (1st position), comprising 90.6% for content (6th position),
76.3% for usability (1st position) and 99.3% for design (1st position).

. Average scores for our sample to date are 83.2% overall, 90.2% for content, 71.1% for usability and
88.5% for design. Sites reviewed so far belong to (in descending order of overall position):

. Eversheds;

. Linklaters;

. Lovells;

. Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer;

. Allen & Overy;

. DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary;

. Slaughter and May;

. Clifford Chance; and

. Herbert Smith.

Competition in the content rankings is tight, so dropping just a few points can make a significant difference. Despite a score above 90%, Eversheds’ website comes in below average as it overlooks a few key criteria.

Despite the profile enjoyed by all the biggest law firms, we advocate including a readily accessible paragraph or two — an ‘About Us’ section — describing the firm in general terms to those who may need reassurance that they have found the right website.

A useful extension of such a page would be a downloadable brochure introducing the firm. Not meeting this recommendation, and the absence of the firm’s VAT number, narrow Eversheds’ lead overall.

As previously reported in this column, all large firms seem to have trouble with usability, but relatively Eversheds has come out on top. The firm’s attention to detail, especially in the area of accessibility, is very commendable and many other criteria have been satisfied.

Of the few criticisms, we always look for a ‘Print’ button on every page and encourage firms to limit the number of clicks between pages to three, neither of which Eversheds has achieved.

Search engine visibility is good but, although not scored in this survey, we note that pages located at URLs with a ‘?’ in them are not always registered by Google. This could be caused by a technicality common in ASP-driven websites that can be easily rectified.

The website’s design score is going to take some beating: a near perfect score leaves little more that Eversheds or others can do to improve, until we revise our scoring system at the end of the year (an annual discipline).

One true test of good design is the ease with which one can become comfortable with a website and not feel as though the graphics team were in it for just the award nominations.

A clean, unfussy design is easy on the eye and does not interfere with the purpose of the web-site: to disseminate information quickly and efficiently. If it is so good, why didn’t the website get a perfect design score? After discussion the reviewers felt that the text size was just on the small size on our standard resolution setting (1024x768 pixels). But that was it. Not too much to complain about, really.

Visit the site at www.eversheds.com

James Tuke is a consultant at Intendance.

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