OFAR - Oficina de Abogados

OFAR is a law and accounting firm. They offer a wide range of legal, accounting, and tax services throughout the Dominican Republic.

They came to us through one of our business partners, Bumo (formerly Marketing Ilustracións).

When OFAR came to us, they already had a website. The main problem was that it was completely broken; the images were extremely pixelated, it lacked any animation or dynamism, and the design didn’t reflect at all what a company of OFAR’s scope should look like.

Our main objective was to give the website a fresh new look, based on the new brand design, ensuring it was responsive and showcased the company in all its glory.

In addition to creating this new image, we had to maintain the website’s search engine ranking (SEO), as it contains hundreds of articles, many of which generated significant traffic for certain keywords.

The first challenge we faced wasn’t the website’s visual design; it was the fact that the hundreds of articles were on a subdomain, and we also had to change the URLs of some categories that served as the basis for these URLs.

After that, we had to unify the scattered content, which the client had requested be consolidated for better user understanding (which is excellent, since user experience is always paramount). We also had to ensure that search engines didn’t lose track of this content and penalize our search engine ranking.

The final challenge, of course, was to create an attractive, user-centered design that reflected the client’s professionalism.

We began the analysis phase, downloading a backup to ensure we could always safely revert to the starting point if any errors occurred.

Once we had the data, we proceeded to analyze and model the article data and all the website URLs. This is important because we must maintain these same links on the new website we will create, as they are indexed by search engines.

To begin the design process, the first thing we did was create the sitemap showing how the website would be structured. We then sent the first draft of the homepage for approval.

The client approved the homepage design, so we proceeded to design all the other internal sections.

For final approval, we sent the client a high-fidelity mockup with the designs assembled to simulate page usage, clicks, and scrolling. After making a few adjustments, we successfully completed the design phase.

This was the area where we really needed to pay close attention. As mentioned above, the site had over 650 articles and many other internal pages.

After creating the new internal pages, we downloaded all the data to our installation, since working on an old installation is not recommended at all. Interestingly, we found 32 active plugins on this website 😵.

It goes without saying that having so many plugins is a very bad practice. When there are so many plugins, it’s usually because the developer was trying to implement many features that should ideally be handled within the code of a child theme. Each of these plugins loads resources, and when you have more than 30, the resource load on the website becomes enormous.

For the links, we verified that they were all pointing to a post correctly, but since we made changes, the URLs of the content we removed were redirected with a 301 redirect. This is a type of redirect that tells search engines that the content is now located elsewhere, thus avoiding having dead URLs and maintaining a clean website.

As a final phase before delivering the project, we go through a usability test. We have an internal checklist that we use to track any small details that might be missed, thus ensuring that the client gets a functional, responsive website that loads quickly and is visually appealing to the end user.

As a result, we ended up with a modern website that more than meets the expectations of our clients and their customers.

Our Google ranking not only remained stable but actually improved, and thanks to usability enhancements, the number of emails and calls sent from the website also increased.

So, if you have a website with a lot of content that’s already ranking well on Google and you need someone to give it a professional update, don’t hesitate to contact us.