Picture of Paul Silver

Paul Silver

Making websites for companies and helping advertise them

Client: Lawrecruiter

Lawrecruiter is a recruitment portal for the legal industry in the UK. I worked with the group starting Lawrecruiter to create the main public website, internal sales intranet, and embedded results within partners websites. It is by far the largest website I have worked on as a developer and wrote all of the code apart from a reporting suite written by a developer working with me in the summer of 2003.

The Lawrecruiter project was tackled by myself and web designer David Andrew. We worked very closely with our clients, and took their original specification and re-wrote it in to a document that described a website that would both work and be possible to create. We then worked out timescales for the project and set to work on actually making it. While David handled the design, I tackled the large amount of development required to create the large site.

Since initial launch in early 2003 I have worked closely with Lawrecruiter to add and change elements of the working website.

  1. The main website

    The Lawrecruiter website is built around ease of use for visitors who may not use the internet very often. Central to the website is the job search facility, which allows candidates to quickly find the job they want in the area they are interested in.

    The clients had a strong idea of how they wanted Lawrecruiter to look and work, and David and I worked within these to create a useable and flexible website. Features of the site include:

    • Private client and candidate areas
    • Saved searches and jobs by e-mail, with easy sign-up
    • Secure store for CVs and other documents
    • Website will remember which vacancies you have previously applied for
    • Search results caching system to reduce database accesses
    • On-line client account sign-up
    • Nearby vacancies when nothing found in local area
  2. The sales intranet

    The intranet has two tasks: to act as a contact manager for the sales staff in the company, and to provide admin functions to control various properties of the main website.

    Facilities available in the contact manager were based on a software package the manager of Lawrecruiter had used in the past, with some improvements to meet the requirements of an on-line business. The contacts database was pre-loaded with information bought from a third party.

    The website administration sections allow control over what options are available for searching and placing vacancies on the site, what time limits trigger job expiry and the various other variables a complex website has running in the background.

  3. Embedded 'powered by Lawrecruiter' search

    Lawrecruiter wished to be able to offer their vacancy database through partner websites. They needed the ability to easily add Lawrecruiter searches and results to their websites, and to be able to re-brand the design to match the look and feel of the website it was being embedded within.

    I re-worked the vacancy search code and design to set all colouring, images and blocks of content so they could be changed within a CSS file provided to Lawrecruiter partners. By changing the CSS the partner can quickly change the colouring of the various elements of the pages, and change buttons and fonts so they fit in with their own designs.

    Embedding can happen in a variety of ways:

    • Content pulled from Lawrecruiter server to their own (e.g. YSG - changed provider in 2005)
    • Frames based (e.g. Scottish Law Online)
    • Hosted search (e.g. Legal Day)

Back to Client List

© 2024 Paul Silver & Silver Web Services Ltd