Giving an existing website a new life for legal firm

Website improvements helping Bolt Burdon Kemp change peoples’ lives for the better

The team at Bolt Burdon Kemp (BBK) was looking for a new digital partner to drive forward their existing WordPress site through monthly development work and optimisation. 

BBK wanted to avoid a repeat of history, where previous iterations of their website quickly became outdated and needed to be completely rebuilt. They came to us seeking to move forward with a different way of working, prioritising continuous improvements to their existing website. 

We catered to this with our Always Evolving® model; a strategic alternative to building an entirely new website every couple of years.

What the client wanted

• Take over the management of their existing website that was built by another web agency
• Support topical campaigns and content hubs with tailored experiences for different audience groups 
• Improve site stability, uptime, site speed and performance
• Extend functionality and make the site more engaging 
• Cookie compliance
• Back-end usability 
• Form customisation and flexibility plus automated testing
• Accessibility improvements 

About BBK

Bolt Burdon Kemp (BBK) is a leading national law firm, specialising in securing compensation for clients who have been seriously injured.

BBK change peoples’ lives, and the law, for the better

Growing every year, the firm is going from strength to strength. They wanted to evolve their website over time to optimise for the best performance, extend functionality, improve UX, add new features, support their campaigns, and showcase their social justice agenda more firmly.

Inheriting a website built by another agency

Working on websites that were originally launched by other agencies is often technically challenging, but we’re well versed in overcoming these challenges. Running through our detailed onboarding process gives us visibility of any issues and space to solve them.

A significant obstacle to overcome when we first started our work with BBK was getting the site stable and reliable. Their website was constantly timing out, and we identified that this was related to issues with the server setup.

Fixing these major problems with uptime was folded into the onboarding process. We managed a hosting migration so that we could swiftly move forward with a more reliable server and stable website to work with.

Presenting hubs with informational content on their website in better ways

BBK wanted their website to offer a more personalised experience for different audience groups:

• The Veterans’ Resettlement Hub had a huge amount of information that needed to be more bitesize, with clear navigation to more details and other services. 
• The Women’s Health Hub needed a fresher and more engaging design. 
• And the Brain Injury Employment Hub needed an entirely bespoke WordPress-integrated solution.

Other areas with room for improvement across the site

• Cookie compliance
• Back-end usability 
• Form customisation and flexibility plus automated testing
• Accessibility improvements across the whole site
• Making quizzes and surveys more useful and valuable
• And more!

Onboarding an existing site and getting the site to a stable space

Our first challenge was onboarding BBK’s existing website, but we tackled this by following a thorough internal process covering:

1. Local development setup
2. Full site and server audits
3. Integration analysis and gaining access to external services
4. Documentation including user journey workflows
5. Familiarising ourselves deeply with the site so future deployments will roll out smoothly
6. Benchmarking site performance

Server move to improve uptime

The team at BBK informed us that their website was often timing out and going down. We investigated this and identified issues with the server set up on their existing host, then made our recommendations for a server move that would improve uptime. 

Our recommendation was to host the website with Kinsta, which offers green hosting using Google Cloud platform and Cloudflare. 

We coordinated the transfer over to Kinsta and BBK’s general server response time dropped from 2-3 secs to around 0.1 second, a huge speed improvement. Their uptime skyrocketed to 100% and we recorded huge performance gains with 91% improvement.

Bringing new life to online resource hubs for veterans and women’s health

We worked with BBK to refresh both their Veterans’ Resettlement Hub and their Women’s Health Hub, which present resources relevant to each audience group.

The Veterans’ Resettlement Hub had a huge amount of information that needed to be more bitesize, with clear navigation to more details and other services. First we advised on design, considering usability and aesthetics. Then we implemented the improvements, including:

• Unique illustrations for hero sections to represent different categories
• Ability to integrate stats, top tips, videos and other types of content
• Intuitive navigation and layout re-worked so content is easy to digest
• Showcasing charity partnerships (also rolled out to other areas of the site)
• Simplifying how to find information to reduce cognitive load and make decision-making easier

The Women’s Health Hub had a design that BBK wanted to freshen up and make more engaging, with new functionality to host videos and other types of content such as podcasts.

This refresh brought the hub more in line with the current look and feel of the site, while prioritising intuitive navigation and user experience. The work included:

• Multiple colour palette options for design
• Sticky menu to allow for easy navigation through the hub’s different categories
• Engaging content such as video and stats 

We aimed to keep the space as simple and as flexible as possible, future-proofing it as the amount of content expands and making sure the work can be replicated across further hubs.

Launching bespoke solutions for further resource hubs

Brain Injury Employment Hub

BBK asked us to help them create an entirely bespoke WordPress-integrated solution for their Brain Injury Employment Hub campaign resource, providing useful information for both employer and employee audiences. 

They wanted something unique and creative that met a high standard of accessibility and paced information in a manner appropriate for their target audience, who may be experiencing cognitive challenges. 

Our work included:

• A campaign landing page with a table of contents
• Signposting to the resource both audience groups
• Video content
• Sections of the guide broken down into FullPage.js slides, a functionality and stylistic tool to help make this campaign feel unique and special
• Both dark and light theme variants available via the CMS for extra variation and flexibility
• A block editor with a range of blocks; lists, content, headings, accordions, top tips and sticky side contact (stats, images and video embeds), giving them the ability to build out the campaign further or create future campaigns using this toolset in a way that aligns perfectly with their brand
• Detailed documentation on how to build out the campaigns

Supporting topical campaigns with more valuable quizzes and surveys

The website had some old resources with untapped potential, such as a campaign quiz that had not been set up in a way that was easy to report on or re-use. We proposed building this in Gravity Forms utilising the survey add-on to give this feature more value.

We refreshed the quiz feature by making it fully accessible, making the look and feel coherent with the website’s design, and ensuring it is completely reusable for future, similar campaigns.

In addition, we enabled greater variety for the quizzes and surveys. This means the client can include new formats for their questions, such as true or false, multiple choice, scoring polls, and optional open-ended text fields, and conditional logic that sends users through different routes  depending on their answers.

Finally, the results can be exported into a format that is readable, easily organised and analysed.

Incremental improvements

Always Evolving is an ongoing journey we take with clients, making their existing websites exceptional. This involves major features and enhancements, as well as a combination of smaller improvements. For instance, for BBK, we:

• Implemented usability improvements for menu on mobile, improving UX and accessibility  
• Designed and implemented a privacy banner that was legally compliant, as un-intrusive to user experience as possible while still enabling the client to collect valuable user data
• Back-end usability improvements to improve the website editing experience, such as enabling custom selection of staff profiles for specific areas of the website
• Fixed pre-existing issues with content tagging across the site (which was showing incorrect or irrelevant tasks)
• Rebuilt contact forms in Gravity Forms to allow for more customisation and flexibility, as well as allowing us to implement automated testing so that the client and us would be alerted if the forms stopped working 
• Rolled out accessibility improvements across the whole site