CHDB Law

Overview

I partnered with design agency Ward Nipper LLC to develop a fully custom enterprise website for Arizona law firm CHDB Law. During the project, a re-brand was also added to the scope which required migrating to a new domain as well as revamping the site structure.

Challenge

Technical debt, 3rd-party dependencies, and no one could edit it!

The original website suffered from a lack of support and accrued technical debt. Using a commercial theme from Theme Forest, the site also had WP Bakery Builder and Revolution Slider bundled within the theme plus numerous plugins and custom code. Automated accessibility tests noted 70 issues on the home page, largely due to the theme and mobile performance was notably poor (an “F” rating on Yellow Labs). In addition, since there wasn’t a developer on staff, no one really knew how to edit the site. Content wasn’t being added or updated and their search performance suffered as a result.

Approach

Ward and I worked to prioritize accessibility in a clean, modern design that wouldn’t rely on third-party dependencies to function. We also developed a comprehensive content strategy that repurposed the firm’s popular Arizona Statute publication into an “HOA Knowledge Base”. This searchable directory made the PDF instantly mobile-friendly and fully accessible.

Additional features:

• A robust custom post type for attorneys that connects to a custom, filterable taxonomy structure connected to practice areas, bar associations, and more.
• Migrated “Seminar” posts to a fully custom post type and template, with date filters and upcoming seminar sliders. Seminar are also connected to attorneys using the ACF relationship field to display auto-magically on attorney bios.
• Connected practice areas to “industries” to enable us to show related practice areas and connect core services to both attorney and seminar content.

Designing in the browser

Designing in the browser is faster (and better) that trying to build from a static mockup. This project allowed designer and developer to fully collaborate using Sketch and Figma. We could also test things like color contrast before building out the theme. We started with wireframes for a proof of concept to think about content priority:

This website is a hybrid theme using _S (Underscores) which takes advantage of many of the newer site editor features such as theme.json and template parts.

Results

The new website not only has a more modern look and feel, content is significantly more accessible and performant. Mobile performance scores have improved and the site is ranking for desired search terms and critical services.

Project Details