BP has, not surprisingly, been in the news a lot lately. What was surprising was their release of "substantially altered photos" relating to the Gulf oil spill.

Wired.com, a daily technology news Web site, took this opportunity to mock BP (for not verifying the Photoshop skills of the people they hired) and challenged their readers to do it better. They did; Godzilla and Star Wars were popular improvements.

But that's not the only thing mocked online, as anybody who reads The Onion, a parody news site, knows. Any newsworthy item is fair game: WikiLeaks has made the news by releasing classified data about the war in Afghanistan; WookieLeaks is a new meme on Twitter with Star Wars-related leaks.

Law firms are not exempt from being mocked. Just last month, Law.com released a list of winners of The Snark's First Annual Big Law Webbies, rating the "best and the worst in Big Law websites." The categories include best and worst headshots, most obscure blog topics, and most mocked big law web site, among others.

It's amazing how much effort is put into the parody sites and awards... just to make us laugh.

-- Frances

There are some concepts to keep in mind when designing a Web site. Here are a few key things to avoid; these tend to really annoy many users.

• Hiding basic information
  Without using the Search box (if the site has one), how many clicks does it take you to find the hours for your local public library? Where I live, I have to click on two links; the libraries for our four neighboring towns have that information on the home page.
  
  This is even more important when it comes to contact information; you don't want to lose customers because they can't figure out how to reach you.


• Long dropdowns
  If you have to scroll down to see the rest of the dropdown, there's a problem. If your content is too long for the dropdown, condense it or skip it entirely; show the attorney titles as links instead of each attorney name, or link directly to the Practice Areas landing page instead of listing all practices in the dropdown.


• Odd color choices
  I'm not objecting to a purple and green site because of the colors... just in terms of readability. The background and text colors should have enough contrast to be read without visitors having to change their browser settings. And you should take into account the effects of color blindness on a visitor's experience (there are tools that can help you test this).


• Frames
  Frames eliminate the ability to bookmark specific pages (you bookmark the top frame instead), and cause printing (which frame do you want to print?), accessibility (text readers have problems with them), and search engine optimization (determining what part to include) problems. They were kind of neat when they were new, but they've long since become outdated.


• All Flash Web sites
  All Flash sites take longer to load, and manage to disable the browser back button, font size adjustments, and bookmarking, all of which are basic browser functionality that may people rely on... and that's assuming your visitor has Flash installed.
  
  Visitors can't select text to copy out, because it's embedded in the Flash content; alternate text has to be created for text readers (but still won't be visible to most people). You can guess what that does in terms of search engine optimization....
  
  As one of our clients said about Flash, "For general business purposes, it's about as unnecessary and frivolous as socks on a penguin, as far as I'm concerned."

Please note that the question is not "Are you a twit?" Despite the easy (and frequently tempting) transition from "Twitter" to "twit", the word has a vastly different connotation.

You've probably heard about Twitter by now. It's a social networking and "microblogging" site - "micro" because all posts are limited to 140 characters.

What can you say in 140 characters? Not the previous paragraph, unless you remove a dozen or so characters. You either practice brevity or learn "Textese", which uses "the fewest number of characters needed to convey a comprehensible message". If you've ever received a text from a teenager, you've probably seen some version of it.

Despite the limitations, some law firms are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. John Quinn, Founder & Managing Partner at Quinn Emanuel tweets... from Seoul, as of his last tweet.

There are personal injury and matrimonial law firms tweeting, law firm job postings, among many other tweeters. Many airlines and news sites tweet; some airlines offer deals, including city-specific accounts, via Twitter.

Should you tweet? That's up to you, but if you do tweet for work, make sure you link your Twitter account to the firm Web site, and vice versa.

--Frances

It's always exciting when the Web sites we've dedicated our efforts to win awards. In January, we mentioned some of the award-winning sites that we rolled out last year. I'm excited to announce that some of our recent Web sites have won more awards.

The Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP Web site was honored by the Legal Marketing Association - Bay Area Chapter with a 2010 Your Honor Award of Excellence in the Web site category; this is the fifth award the MTO Web site has been awarded.

The Hermes Creative Awards, which recognized our work on the Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP and Curiale Hirschfeld Kraemer LLP Web sites last year, has honored our work with three awards this year:

• The Ropers Majeski Kohn Bentley PC Web site was honored with a 2010 Platinum Award.
  
• Dannis Woliver Kelley was awarded a 2010 Gold winner in the category of Overall Web Site.
  
• The Garvey Schubert Barer Web site received a 2010 Honorable Mention.