Foot Anstey – the UK's fastest performing law firm website

A relationship built on better experiences.

When Foot Anstey were in search of a new agency to fly the flag of brilliant user experiences and intuitive content management, our UX and WordPress teams in Bristol were a natural choice.

With expertise in user research, UX design and WordPress development, Illustrate Digital would be a perfect fit to plan, design and implement creative solutions to Foot Anstey’s content and technology challenges.

At the beginning of our relationship we carried out UX and technology audits to help understand what could potentially hold the Comms team back in reaching their goals. The ability to publish content more quickly and smoothly in WordPress became an important focus, alongside helping Foot Anstey to research, plan and prototype new user journeys and user interfaces that would allow customers to interact with services more intuitively.

With a big and growing requirement for technology, there would be plenty for us to do when helping Foot Anstey to enhance their customer experience through technology.

Design that drives customer engagement.

From the main footanstey.com website through to the many internal tools and client-facing portals, there’s a bustling amount of technology that powers the day-to-day business at Foot Anstey.

This impressive architecture is strengthened by Foot Anstey’s plans for ambitious technology growth. And that’s where our user experience team at Illustrate Digital has slotted in perfectly with the internal teams at Foot Anstey.

First conducting a review of the group’s website experience, we planned and prototyped the user journeys of footanstey.com, before re-designing the user interface. This new UI would result in a more user friendly, intuitive experience aimed at helping site visitors to find the services and information they were looking for.

This pursuit of better user experience, alongside our work to prototype Foot Anstey’s internal client portals, is an ongoing collaboration. Improving and growing the overall digital experience helps Foot Anstey to strive for the best UX in the legal industry, something we’re proud to work together to achieve.

An insanely fast website architecture.

Like most other companies, Foot Anstey has a strong appreciation for not only providing a great digital experience to its users, but also to achieve high-ranking results in search engines such as Google, too. Since Google and other search engines consider user experience and performance to be key ranking factors, the two go very much hand in hand.

After carrying out a rebuild of the footanstey.com website, Foot Anstey jumped 146 places in the Legal Digital 200 ranking of the highest performance legal websites in the UK. But as a team, we knew we could achieve even greater.

With our WordPress team working closely on performance improvements, and implementing the valuable learnings discovered by our in-house research and development team, we set about working to accelerate the performance of the newly launched rebuilt footanstey.com website.

Testing and launching some serious performance improvements, Foot Anstey would rise to an astonishing first place in the Legal Digital 200 ranking for website performance, achieving a Google PageSpeed score of 98% on mobile! Something that both Foot Anstey and Illustrate Digital teams are incredibly proud of.

The best part is that we haven’t needed to sacrifice any website functionality or customer experience to achieve these incredible results.

Introducing a brilliantly clever search experience.

With an incredibly content-rich website, Foot Anstey needed a way for users to search and quickly find the content that’s most relevant to them, as well as the services they’re most interested in seeing content about.

We won’t lie, we’ve designed and architected a pretty impressive search tool that serves some really  clever results. Ultimately this is all centred around displaying the best results based on a user’s interests and search intent.

To achieve all of this, we designed and developed a custom user interface for displaying results and integrated Algolia’s powerful search technology with WordPress. This has allowed us to cache the website’s entire content database and return relevant search results within milliseconds. Blink, and you’ll miss it!

What’s next for Foot Anstey and Illustrate Digital?

Even though our relationship has achieved incredible results so far – such as a high performance score, improved user engagement, easier content publishing and some seriously impressive search functionality – we believe our best work is still ahead of us. 

Alongside the Comms and IT teams at Foot Anstey, we continue to improve user experiences, introduce innovative ways to serve content and find new ways to further strengthen employee engagement with the Foot Anstey brand.

As a team we’re exceptionally proud to work with people and companies who value the impact of digital experiences on their customers. Foot Anstey fits this description perfectly, with a real dedication to innovation, continuous improvement and exploring how technology can enhance the experience they deliver to their customers.