TRp 323: Website Redesign in the Age of Artificial Intelligence with Alison Reynolds

[00:00:10] You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, hosted by high stakes headhunter, author and professional speaker, Scott Love. Hey, this is Scott Love with The Rainmaking Podcast. Thanks for joining me on this episode. Our topic title is Website Redesign in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. This is going to be an interesting show.

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[00:03:19] Let me get into what our topic is today. Are you in the type of business where your online presence is important and being able to build trust with your clients? We're going to talk about what happened when one large global organization went through an entire redesign and we have the person on our show that helps spearhead that. Her name is Alison Reynolds. She's the director of digital marketing for Vincent & Elkins. She's a digital marketing and communications leader and has been with Vincent & Elkins for 11 years.

[00:03:47] She pulls back the curtain to show us how she led the initiative to redesign their website in this age of artificial intelligence. I hope you get some great ideas from this episode today. Thanks for listening. Hey, this is Scott Love with the Rainmaking Podcast. Our guest today is Allison Reynolds with Vincent & Elkins. And our topic title is Website Redesign in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Allison, thank you for joining me on the show today.

[00:04:15] Thank you so much, Scott. It's great to be here. It is. And I'm excited to hear about this because this is a real topic. I know a lot of people, if they haven't thought about it, they will, because things have changed so much since AI came on the scene. And so your role with Vincent & Elkins, I understand you all launched your new site in January, 2026. We're going to talk about that and pull out some ideas for people listening that they should be mindful of if they go through that. So kind of tell me the story, Allison.

[00:04:44] When was it a decision that you all made to redesign it? And what was it that led up to that decision? We'll kind of go back to the infancy of the concept here. Sure, sure. Happy to. So like you said, we launched this site in January of 2026. I would say the whole project was in total maybe an 18-month endeavor that began with,

[00:05:09] you know, a request for proposal and a search for a partner, an agency to help us through this. And what led to that decision, I can go back even further. I'd say the last time we redesigned our firm website, that site launched in February of 2020. And so if you remember, that was a key time we launched our website and immediately went into the COVID pandemic. Wow.

[00:05:34] So it had been going on five years that we had been living with essentially the same website, the same look and feel, the same infrastructure, the same capabilities. And while nothing was overly broken about it, we just knew that five years is an eternity in digital time and digital speak. And we really needed to modernize.

[00:05:59] We want to give our audience, you know, a best in class experience when they come to our site. We want to give our partners a best in class platform for marketing themselves and the services of the firm and their expertise. So we just knew that we were due to take a refresh and we had, you know, firm leadership buy in on that concept alone.

[00:06:22] Fortunately, I feel like we're at a time when leaders, you know, understand that this is a piece of technology that needs evolving care and attention. So it was understood that we were almost overdue to make our arguably biggest, you know, piece of technology, you know, more modernized and up to date for our audience. That's great. And tell me, what was your role in this whole project, Alison?

[00:06:50] Sure. Well, I was one stakeholder in a group of a few. I'd say one difference that we took this time around was a pretty tight knit group of stakeholders. I essentially led the day to day of the project.

[00:07:06] I think one exceptional thing that we did was hire an external contract project manager because this is a full time job for anyone that that no one's going to have all the time to give it in their day to day. So with an external project manager, you know, I kind of led the day to day of the project.

[00:07:26] I was joined by our chief communications officer, our creative director, two team members from our technology team, our lead, our lead head of business development, excuse me, our chief business development officer. And then a couple of my direct team members who work on the digital marketing team that kind of made up our core stakeholder group, which I think was helpful.

[00:07:51] You know, we definitely got a lot of buy in from other departments of the firm and, of course, the partnership and other firm leaders. But in terms of the project operations and those weekly status calls, we had a pretty a pretty tight group that fortunately we had all gone through the previous website redesign project. So we were very familiar with what was at hand and working together. And I think that helped us out a lot, too. We're very fortunate to have that.

[00:08:19] Yeah, that sounds like a good group that you had, a real good task force. Everybody's committed to working together on that goal. What were some of the success factors and goals that you had in redesigning the site? Yeah. So let's see. In terms of goals, I kind of mentioned, you know, we we wanted to just kind of modernize the look and feel. We knew that that had gotten stale and and we wanted to present a just a very sophisticated kind of aesthetic on the site.

[00:08:47] There were a few things that we did want to kind of fix or improve. And I thought we had done a really good job over that that five year span of kind of documenting things that, OK, next time we do this, we really want to focus on X, Y, Z. One of those things was our site search function had just kind of fallen behind in terms of best practice and standards.

[00:09:10] So we wanted to take a fresh look at site search and and also not just update it to where we were at that point in time, but really future proof it or make it flexible enough to evolve because we know that search across the board is changing rapidly. So we know that this that particular feature of the site is going to be changing and evolving going forward.

[00:09:37] One other goal we had, I believe we delivered on was really making the site a lot more content forward because, you know, similarly, we have done such a fantastic job, I have to say, of of developing and creating original thought leadership and dynamic content as well. In terms of video and just interactive content that our old site was not really built to show that off.

[00:10:05] And so we wanted to be able to really lean into that and have have a place for it to be showcased and and changed out and rotated in a way that really extended the use of all that content we were making. That's interesting. I think that that's relevant. And I think it is something that obviously from a thought leadership standpoint, somebody goes to your site, they see, oh, here's a video of one of your partners talking about something and maybe it was filmed at a conference.

[00:10:32] I think that also leads to the decision of, OK, which firm am I going to go with? And as you know, the website is all they have. That's their perspective. That's all they can see. And they're making a decision. So that's a smart decision you all had. And congratulations on what you've done. Let me ask you this in terms of artificial intelligence. Here we are in the world of AI. Everything's changed significantly in the last few years.

[00:10:56] How did that impact the decisions you made about what to change and what what were kind of your considerations in terms of artificial intelligence? Absolutely. Yes. I'm so glad you asked, because even when we were doing this project, we were not where we are today in the world of AI. You know, we were still six months ago. It's like a vastly different world. So I'm glad that we were already thinking about it and thinking about those considerations and the impacts.

[00:11:23] So I would say we know that search trends are drastically moving towards Gen AI platforms and other LLMs. And we knew that our site needed to be structured so that our content was most optimized to be cited in these Gen AI results.

[00:11:42] So that was one major consideration was how do we structure our page layout to be friendly and crawlable to these LLMs if it's any different than it is today. And so we spent some time with our agency making subtle and minor adjustments to the way that that content is structured on various types of pages, whether it be bios versus capabilities versus insights.

[00:12:10] So that was one significant area that we kept in mind as we designed and built the site. I'd say on the back end of things, we wanted to know if there were ways to use AI to help us more efficiently manage content in our CMS. You know, one goal we had was to serve up related content based on what a user might be reading at the moment.

[00:12:37] And without doing full on, you know, personalization efforts on the site, you know, we looked for ways within our CMS to say, OK, we just we just added this new page. What do we have in the CMS that's related that can take the legwork out of relating certain people, pages and practices? I think finally, too, you know, we want to bring that experience that that kind of related content experience forward onto the front end of the site for our audience as well.

[00:13:06] And using AI to maybe deliver like, oh, you just read this. You might be interested in this video or this CLE presentation or this deal note that's related to what you were just viewing. So that's something we're still actively working on and looking into how to bring that forward onto the site to just keep users engaged longer and and give them more related content to help round out their visit. That's great. I'm curious. Are you able to measure how long a visitor stays on your site?

[00:13:36] I'm curious about that. Absolutely. Yes. We use Google Analytics to measure all of the KPIs on the site, and it absolutely can measure how long a visitor stays on the site from seconds to minutes. It does reset at a certain point, but we can look at also at the depth, the scroll depth of the page to see how far they actually got down. And that kind of rounds out the view of how long they're spending.

[00:14:04] And that gets kind of synthesized into an engagement rate that we use to identify content that's maybe, you know, not performing the way the way we want it to and look for ways to improve it. That's great. So that's actually a key performance indicator that you have, how long they're on the site. What are some other KPIs that you all kept in mind as you went through this change? Sure. Let's see. I think, you know, page depth is is another one.

[00:14:31] How many pages is a user visiting within their session and kind of looking at the journey that that they take during that session? Do they enter the site on a lawyer bio? Do they then visit a related insight or news item that's related to that attorney? Or do they visit a related capability page? A lot of our users enter the site within the recruiting pages.

[00:14:58] And so we take a look at what the depth level is and engagement level is within those recruiting pages. I shouldn't be surprised, but I may be sometimes surprised to see that that those metrics are always incredibly high. And we should take it as a compliment that people really want to work at Vincent Nalkins, both on the lawyer side and business professional side. But back to the KPIs, you know, another one was site speed and how that relates to our search ranking.

[00:15:28] One problem we've had in the past is our site running kind of slowly. And as I'm sure, you know, just as a general consumer of digital content, if a page takes too long to load, you are out like you're gone. And so we could tell that there was some optimization we could do there to improve the speed and therefore overall performance of the site. So that was something we looked to address as well. That's interesting.

[00:15:57] I would say, and I'm kind of taking this from the perspective of somebody looking at a firm, am I going to work with this firm? Or they've done some work with us in litigation. Maybe we can work with them on some regulatory issues, whatever it is. And all they have is your firm's site. And maybe they've talked to a couple of partners, they've seen them at conferences, but really the site, that is more than just a billboard. That is the firm in their perspective. And I've seen this in recent weeks going to AMLA 100 firm sites. And it takes so long to load.

[00:16:26] Or it's just kind of wonky. I've seen that. And I mean, I'm on the outside. I'm not making a decision about hiring them. But imagine what people are thinking of when they're getting that same result. Let me ask you this. Let's say you're advising someone that's doing the same thing within their site. Perhaps you're a consultant, so to speak. What would be the pitfalls they need to watch out for that you saw firsthand and you were able to obviously overcome?

[00:16:54] What would be like the top three or four pitfalls they need to watch out for if they ever did this project? Sure. That's a great question because there can be several pitfalls. I would say the classic phrase of not letting perfect get in the way of progress. We had a pretty tight list of requirements that we needed to deliver on for this project.

[00:17:19] And as you go through it, you can start adding to the list of requirements. And, oh, well, let's fix this too. And if we're going to fix that, it's like remodeling a home. You know, suddenly you're remodeling your entire house when all you wanted was new curtains because everything just sort of waterfalls, you know, onto the next thing. So don't let perfect get in the way of progress. You know, we had a launch date on our project timeline.

[00:17:46] And that launch date reflected, you know, kind of phase one of what we critically wanted to launch with. And then we kind of had a soft phase two following that of other nice to haves that we kept working on. But like the bulk of the project was out there and we had delivered on the majority of our goals.

[00:18:08] So kind of relatedly, you know, not trying to spend two and a half years doing absolutely everything on your wish list. Try to chunk it into maybe phases and keep that requirements list as tight as possible and avoid that scope creep as some of our agency partners try to like to say.

[00:18:33] I would also say, you know, there can be a lot of input on what the site should look like and how it should function. And if you try to please everyone, you will never finish the project. And, you know, I say that delicately because we wanted our utmost priority was to deliver a site that met the requirements of our firm leadership and our partnership.

[00:19:01] And I think we did a good job of soliciting input in more of an informal way that gave us a really good idea of what people didn't like, what they wished worked better. And, you know, other example sites that they visit, their client sites, other firm sites. I saw this and I really think it'd be great if we presented our material this way. But you're not going to please everybody.

[00:19:24] And everything, you know, we certainly got a lot of feedback after we launched even like, hey, I, you know, I wish that this looked this way or what did you think about doing this, you know, a different way. And that sort of led to some of the phase two and phase three, you know, enhancements and tinkering that we did.

[00:19:40] But fortunately, our group had a lot of trust and buy-in from firm leaders that got us 90% of the way there where most everybody was very pleased with the end result. And so that's great. Yeah, it's just keeping that kind of focus and state of mind. Congratulations on that, Allison. What's something that you learned through this that really surprised you through this process? Oh, man.

[00:20:09] What I learned that surprised me is how the launch day of a new site is really not the end of the project. It's kind of the beginning. And I'm really glad that we have the kind of support partnership we have with our agency is constructed so that we can continue to make enhancements

[00:20:35] and evolve without a new statement of work every time, without a new budget every time. We've kind of set up a support retainer that essentially allows us to continue to evolve the site. There's a really great example I saw many years ago that uses Amazon as an example of redesigning a website.

[00:20:57] And if you think about going to Amazon site, you probably don't remember ever seeing a big new, we've redesigned amazon.com. It's been extremely gradual and subtle over the last 20, 25 years. And so that was an approach that I think that I learned in the process that we are very much wanting to put in place going forward is let's not wait five years before we do this again.

[00:21:23] Let's make small incremental adjustments along the way so that we're kind of always delivering that best-in-class experience for visitors, not just once every five years. That's great, Allison. I want to thank you for being on the show and sharing this story with us. I think that our listeners will find it insightful, and I know you've given some value to them today. Tell us if you could kind of summarize three action steps.

[00:21:46] If somebody is interested in doing this in their own firm's platform, in their own firm's website, what would be three action steps you'd recommend for them to get started on this? Sure. I would recommend, if you have not done so, having some kind of third party maybe conduct an audit of your site, both from a kind of branding and aesthetics and user experience standpoint, as well as a technical standpoint.

[00:22:13] See, gauge, you know, give an impartial view, an impartial expert view as to where you kind of stand. That way you'd kind of know how much work, you know, might be in front of you and really hone in on what you'd like to focus on. I'd also recommend taking advantage of some tools out in the marketplace that can evaluate your firm's presence in generative AI citations and LLM citations.

[00:22:41] There are such tools out there that can tell you how your firm is being spoken about within these results, and you can even get some competitive analysis as well of how your competitors are being surfaced and cited in these results. I think that is a really critical piece that will tell a lot about where we're going in content structure, content development, and search relevancy.

[00:23:07] Lastly, I would do just a content audit of what's currently on your site in terms of insights, long-form thought leadership, capability narratives, bio-narratives, and determine if it's really time to dust those off or overhaul them. I know that's a big endeavor to rewrite capability narratives or bio-narratives.

[00:23:34] Again, those often come with a lot of input, but I think where we are in terms of generative engine optimization and search relevancy, those pages can often go forgotten about for a while. And we ourselves are due to take a fresh look at a lot of those narratives that maybe haven't been updated. Even just a year or two is too long. So I think a content audit would be a great place to start, too. That's great, Allison.

[00:24:04] Thank you so much for being on the show. And then tell us a little bit about you that you'd like our listeners to know, and we'll put all of your contact info in the show notes. Sure. Thanks. Well, I've been with Vincent and Elkins for almost 11 years as the Director of Digital Marketing. In that time, like I've mentioned, we've redesigned the website a couple of times.

[00:24:23] I work really closely with our business development, talent, and technology teams to ensure that that web platform is modern and functioning and delivering a best-in-class experience. I also oversee our content development and social media marketing effort.

[00:24:42] And we've made some really fantastic strides in those areas over the last few years, really putting a focus on dynamic content and being really intentional with the kind of content we share out into the world. Prior to legal, my background is in media and publishing. So I have a journalism degree. I'm not a lawyer, and I came to this firm having no knowledge of legal marketing, but I have learned so much in my time here. I love this industry.

[00:25:11] I love that it's about people and relationships at its core. I think a lot of professional services businesses are built on that. One of the most exciting endeavors that we're working on now is we've recently launched a big brand campaign to advertise our AI infrastructure and data center development legal services.

[00:25:33] We're utilizing a lot of digital marketing tactics from Google advertising to paid media to print advertising and out-of-home advertising. And it's a little bit of a new endeavor for the firm, and we're already seeing it work tremendously well, so bringing us a lot of web traffic and potential business leads. So it's been an exciting new endeavor for the firm that's allowing us to learn a lot, but also really extend the visibility of our brand. That's great.

[00:26:01] Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, Allison, of what you all have done and for being with us today. I really appreciate your time and sharing your expertise with us today. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. Thank you for listening to The Rainmaking Podcast. For more information about our recruiting services for international law firms, visit our website at attorneysearchgroup.com.

[00:26:27] To inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention, conference, sales meeting, or executive retreat, visit therainmakingpodcast.com.