LexBlog recently redesigned 13 Covington & Burling blogs, adding a variety of visual and functional upgrades to improve user experience. The firm’s senior designer of digital marketing, Mike Vallebuona offered some insight on the process and end result.
“We redesigned our website in April and we wanted our 13 blogs to match the updated design,” Vallebuona said. “We also had the goals of making our blog posts easier to read, making the mailing list signup boxes more prominent and making it easier for our blog authors to add images to their posts.”
The changes that come with the redesign offer a lot of different benefits to both Covington’s blog authors and their audience.
“The new full-width design and san-serif font makes the posts easier to read, and I think the large, splashy featured images are going to help make a stronger first impression for readers,” Vallebuona said. “The great thing about the redesign is that hardly anything changed on the backend—no need to retrain our blog authors, so they can just continue doing what they love to do, which is writing and posting!”
Redesigning this many blogs is a several-stage process. Covington and LexBlog began discussing the potential for redesigning the blogs all the way back in January, and after extensive planning, the fairly complex transition began in May.
Redesign launches began on June 21 and ended July 15. The process was running parallel to the aforementioned site redesign, and it required a lot of collaboration between the firm’s marketing and design teams as well as frequent communication with LexBlog.
I always like to ask how the process for these types of projects went because, clearly, the task at hand was no small feat. The answer typically sounds something like Vallebuona’s.
“The process was incredibly smooth. The thought of redesigning 13 blogs was overwhelming to me—but the Lexblog team made everything a breeze. They were responsive to our feedback on the initial designs and helped get everything to where it needed to be, including some very specific requests from our blog authors.”
Most importantly, Vallebuona and Covington’s bloggers are happy with the end result.
“The redesigned blogs all look fabulous. We’ve gotten great feedback from our blog authors—I think the updated design will re-energize many of our authors to post more and do more to promote their posts.”
All in all, the months of planning and work definitely paid off.
“Blogging is an important tool for our practice groups to cover breaking issues and be a little more creative with their writing than maybe an “official” client alert on cov.com would allow them to be. Upgrading our 13 blogs to their new design was definitely worth the time and investment.”