Bad law firm websites

I'm working on a long post on what makes a good firm website that I will post soon. But just now I had an experience with Holland & Knight's website that reminds me of the #1 requirement for a firm website: make it easy to find attorney contact information, especially E-mail addresses.

If you go to the Holland & Knight website you'll note that the first page doesn't make it perfectly easy to find attorneys' contact information. They call the attorney information "biographies." I don't want a "biography." I want "contact information." Apparently, "biographies" include contact information. Not intuitive, but okay I'll accept that for now. Interestingly, if you pick the "biographies" link on the left side of the main page you don't get where you need to be; you wind up here, which doesn't include a way to search for attorneys by name.

If you happened to choose the "biographies" link that runs across the top you get something slightly different (???) which allows you to select to search alphabetically. So let's say you pick the letter "L" and wind up here. (How many clicks have we made so far?).

So now you have some people's names with contact information. And you see the little E-mail icon? Go ahead and click one of those and you'll see that it doesn't load the E-mail address into your E-mail program. Oh, no indeedy. They aren't going to turn over control to you. The H&K E-mail icon is a proprietary way of sending email which doesn't allow you to know the person's E-mail address. Is this some sort of spam solution? Or is this just poor web strategy? You decide.