Haseltine Lake is one of the largest independent firms of Patent and Trademark Attorneys in Europe, and has been in existence since the mid 1860s.

When Haseltine Lake approached Netsight to redesign their corporate site, the brief was clear: Create a modern, accessible, involving and easy-to-use site - whilst ensuring it was both easy and efficient to maintain.

We chose to build the site on top of Plone to give the content management capabilities and ease of administration that the brief required, and we then designed and implemented a new custom interface "skin" for the public site. Good accessibility through best practice was engineered into the site from the ground up, using a combination of manual and automated testing and refinement.

A central part of the site is the database of attorney profiles, which feature portrait photography carried out by Netsight to a consistent and defined style. The site also includes a number of places where Haseltine Lake's partners, attorneys and other professionals can contribute more diverse and impromptu content outside of the more usual News section. A good example of this is the database of "Iconic IP" featured on the homepage and in the profiles, which add interest and a personal touch to the site.

The site-wide search system is another example of small details on the site that make all the difference. Results are returned within three categories (People, Publications and Web Pages), and in each category results are ranked by relevance. If a site user searches for one of the disciplines that the firm represents, attorney profiles are presented ranked by experience and seniority, rather than just by the number of occurrences of the keyword (which a regular search algorithm would do).

The site is fully content managed, allowing administrative staff to update virtually all areas in-house with the user-friendly management capabilities of the Plone system, providing features such as multi-user tiered workflow management and change logging as standard.