Scroll-stop teardown
Brown & CrouppenThe homepage
What it's trying to do
Someone lands here on a bad week. The homepage has about four seconds to make them feel like they've reached people rather than a call center, and then get out of the way of the phone. Everything on the page is downstream of that.
What works
The practice-area structure matches how people actually search. Car, truck, motorcycle, bus, pedestrian each get their own door instead of being folded into one "auto accidents" page. Someone whose specific thing happened finds the page about their specific thing.
The office section names real towns. Ferguson. O'Fallon. Arnold. Edwardsville. Fairview Heights. A reader in Fairview Heights sees Fairview Heights, and that lands harder than any map.
Three fixes
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the H1 belongs to the whole category
The H1 is "Award-Winning Personal Injury Law Firm."
Put any firm's name in front of it. It survives every swap. Six hundred firms could run that sentence tomorrow and none of them would be lying, which means it identifies nobody. It's also the one line on the page a search engine and a scared person are both guaranteed to read.
The page knows a better sentence exists. Halfway down: "Proudly Serving St. Louis, Kansas City, and the Midwest." Closer, because it at least names a place.
But the real one is sitting in the nav under an acronym. This firm runs a television operation. Almost nothing else in the category does. That's the H1.
the most-read line on the site stops describing the industry and starts describing this firm.
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seventy-nine menu items
The primary navigation carries 79 links.
Some of that is unavoidable in this category. Practice areas are a real tree and people need to find their branch. But the About menu is where it costs something: BCTV and Stories sit in a list next to Raffle, Referrals, and Careers.
Two of those are the only things on the site a competitor can't copy by Friday. The other three are for people who already know the firm.
Pull BCTV and Stories out of the drawer and put them on the page. Move Raffle, Referrals, and Careers to the footer, where the people looking for them will still find them.
the firm's actual difference stops being a submenu item.
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the Emmy is a shape
The awards run as a scrolling logo carousel. The Emmy is one of the images in it. Its alt text is "EMMY."
An Emmy is given for a specific piece of work in a specific year by a specific group of people. The badge says none of that. It reads like a trust seal, and visitors have been trained to scroll past trust seals since about 2009.
Take it out of the carousel. Give it a line: what it was for, and the year. Then link the thing that won it.
an award nobody else in the category has stops being decoration and starts being evidence.
What I'd make instead
The client films end where the case ends. Signed, settled, thank you.
The scene that isn't on the site is the week after. Not the courtroom, not the check. A person driving that same stretch of highway again, on purpose, because they have to get to work. Hands at ten and two. Nothing happens.
That's the last shot. It's the only part of the whole thing a person in the middle of it actually wants to see, because it's proof the middle ends.
You already have the crew, the channel, and the clients who'd sit for it. Nobody else in the category is going to shoot that, because it doesn't look like a win.
If one of the three is worth acting on, I'll send the rest of the read. If not, that's fine too.
Jason Portillo
Boring Stories · boringstories.io