While looking at updates for practicelaw and the new mndocs site, we came across three nifty ideas to take your website up a notch.

First up, SpicyNodes.  It promises to make your site “spicy” by organizing your site and allowing users to “scan large quantities of information and linger over the details important to them.”  It’s basically an interactive mind map.  On a law firm website, I could see using this to organize practice areas, information about the firm, or as an overall site map.  It’s free for individuals but there’s a monthly fee for businesses, and it’s still in Beta.

For anyone with Q & A on their site, try this nifty little FAQ.  It makes your Frequently Asked Questions more interactive by clicking on the question to see the answer.  See it at work on our mndocs site, though installation on your own site may not be for the faint of heart if the terms CSS and jQuery make you squeamish or itchy. It’s a free download from CSS Tricks, a great site that provides a lot of web design tips and resources.

Lastly, try Wordle.  Have you ever admired a tag cloud on a blog?  Now you can have a word cloud for any website with RSS or other text you enter.  Here’s the one for Practice Blawg using the option to pull words from any site with RSS:

And here’s an example of the option to just enter plain text with words from the MSBA Goals.

Use word clouds on a page of your website (maybe about your practice areas or law firm philosophy), or on marketing materials.  You can customize it with font, number of words, text and background color choices, shape of the cloud, and direction of the words.  Tagul is another similar service.