The Value of a Good Website
Nuno B. M. Lumbrales,
July 8, 2011
Post by Nuno B.M. Lumbrales, lawyer, partner at Lumbrales & Associados and LawRD user:
One year ago, as a partner of a newborn law office, I was confronted (relunctly and along with scarce financial resources) with the need to invest in the development of a website to the office.
At that time, our only target was to keep up along with our direct competitors, avoiding to “stay behind”, as we were resting assured that the website wasn’t going to provide us with measurable profits.
The first surprise was the budget presented to the website development and maintenance, which was quite reasonable. In fact, the competition between many of the Portuguese PME (Small and Medium Enterprises) in the computer sciences business was robust enough to assure that the prices kept reasonable and negotiable. The secret to get a good deal in computer sciences was to avoid making business with the highly acclaimed “monsters” (it only took the estimate budget of the project to get discouraged).
The second surprise was, once again contradicting our assumptions, that in our first year of existence some clients came to us stating they’d known our office through the website after performing some google searches.
At the end of the day, comparing the costs of the website and the profits coming from this specific clients, showed us that the balance was positive right in the first year, reason that led us to conclude that our investment was, in fact, profitable.















