Fuzzy Future Technologies

Canada Laywer Listing: An Organized Index of Canadian Law Professionals. CanadaLawyerList.com wanted us to update their 10 year old website into a modern, database driven resource. Their requirements were simple. The new site had to be easy to update and maintain, it had to be easily searched by visitors, it had to allow lawyers to update their own profiles, and it had to include a method for earning income off the resource.

Our Approach

We first examined existing web sites that performed similar functionality to the original CanadaLawyerList.com website. We quickly determined that many of their competitors used very out of date technology and were also very difficult to navigate. We discussed options with the CanadaLawyerList.com team, and decided that our best route would be to design a site from scratch and migrate their old text based index of lawyers to a new MySQL database based method. This would allow for rapid searching and quick indexing. In addition, we decided to integrate some modern perks such as automatically generated, embedded, Google Maps and PayPal based subscriptions.

Our Expertise

For this project, we built the entire site from the ground up using a custom designed PHP content management system (dubbed FuzzyCMS). We designed and implemented a MySQL database and developed a series of Python scripts that converted the old text based lawyer entries into database records. Once the database was populated, we built a robust search engine that allowed for visitors to quickly find cities and lawyers using common keyword based queries. To help keep the site up to date, we developed a convenient and easy to use system that allows lawyers visiting the site to send updates for their own information directly to the administrators. These update requests are conveniently one click away on all lawyer profile pages. In addition, we developed an entire subscription based system that accepted payments via PayPal for various promotions within the site. For example, for $10.00 per month, a lawyer can promote his/her law firm to the top of the index for their respective city. This system is fully automated, accepts payments via PayPal, and logs subscriptions in the database. To ease in site maintenance, we developed several web based administrative tools to allow for easy moderation without requiring knowledge of the underlying database architecture.

Our Results

CanadaLawyerList.com already has more than 20,000 lawyers indexed, all of which are easily searchable or you can simply browse by Canadian city to find lawyers in your area. In addition to the 20,000 existing lawyers, the site receives on average 10-20 new record requests per week from lawyers not already included. In Google, CanadaLawyerList.com routinely ranks very high for lawyer names and law practices throughout the country when searched via name or specific area of expertise. Furthermore, CanadaLawyerList.com has received hundreds of subscriptions to it’s paid profile improvement program in just under 6 months.