The Situation:

The State Bar of Texas sought out help from our team here at HMG to revamp its online presence towards its members (lawyers) and public citizens. The site has always strived to serve as a community resource: the first place that bar members and the public go for information about Texas lawyers, the State Bar and laws in Texas. With that in mind, the goal for the redesign was to enhance the overall user experience, simplify the current web offerings and enrich the member/public value.

Detective Holmes:

We began the project with a thorough discovery phase where the requirements of the project were defined in greater detail and then the initial strategic and creative direction was established. This phase also involved an analysis across the existing platforms and performance of the State Bar of Texas website. We preformed a complete review across all available site traffic reports, dashboards, heat maps, and log files.

We also focused on the analytics of two primary factors: visitor site behavior and demographics. This analysis brought to life how users are finding the right bits of information and how we can make that process smoother and more efficient. The demographics told us who our core audience is, thus allowing us to take this into consideration as we approached the redesign.

As part of the discovery phase, we preformed an analysis of which ad placements and approaches had and had not worked in the past for the previous site. Later on in the project we balanced our findings against the user experience and visual design of the site to create the best possible ad placements without jeopardizing the consumer’s usage of the site.

Create, Create, Create:

After the completion of the discovery phase, the findings and learnings from that process were applied towards the actual development of the website. Initially, we established 3 design directions for various key pages of the website. These designs where then reviewed by The State Bar of Texas and a comprehensive “final” design for each section was slowly developed based on the direction and feedback we received. We drafted designs for site sections such as the base design, the MyBarPage design, the member search design, event/calendar design, and many others. On top of the visual design, we also established an SEO strategy based upon its discovery analysis that provided an outline of standard best practices.

Making It Pretty:

Now it gets to the fun part. For the visual design, we wanted to give website users a valuable yet rememberable experience while on the new website. The goal was to create something modern yet efficient. Most of our focus was on typography, color palettes, layout of elements, iconography, gird systems and the usage of imagery within the entire design. We presented multiple different ideas to The State Bar of Texas in which they made a selection for which to continue on each.

To Sum It Up:

Although the project was labor intensive it provided us an opportunity to showcase our capabilities here at HMG! The newly developed website launched this month so head on over and check it out firsthand.

Update: we’ve been featured in a Top Law Firm Web Design Companies listing. Check us out!

[button size=”large” type=”square” color=”light-blue” icon=”circle-arrow-right” url=”https://www.texasbar.com/”]Check Out The New Site![/button]