Legal Writing

Trolling for Errors

You’re a corporate counselor and you’re doing some research. Along the way, Google finds a client alert (published by a firm you’ve been thinking of contacting) that seems very pertinent. You click the link to it, and then — rather than the alert — you get a message saying something like, “We recently updated our Web site and some links have changed. Use the search field to find what you want.”

You’re not impressed.

What do you care if this firm recently (nine months ago, it turns out) updated its Web site?

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Now, I’m not going to mention what you should have done when you updated your firm’s site to be sure visitors can find what they want. (What good is a publication people can’t find?)

But I am going to mention something you should be doing on a regular basis to eliminate links that don’t work, and that’s trolling for errors.

Unless your firm’s site is made out of cardboard and duct tape, it has an access log (who visited your site? when? what did they see?). It also has an error log that keeps track of errors (including those generated by hacksters trying to pry into the site).

Review the error log regularly. It will tell you not just about broken links, but of all sorts of errors that could leave visitors (esp. potential clients) with a bad impression.

If your firm claims to pay attention to detail, . . . .

Full post as published by Set in Style on July 01, 2009 (boomark / email).