| We're guessing that this firm doesn't realize that its domain name "mofo" is a slang curse word meaning "mother f---er." We tried to subtly suggest this in last year's review, but since the message doesn't appear to be getting through, we're trying the direct approach this year. Needless to say, the questionable domain name negatively effects our site experience. The "Guided Tour" is an automated overview of the site. They said the tour would take about three minutes, and they were right. At 28.8 Kbps, it took three and a half minutes, but two of the pages didn't load completely. Also, we were puzzled by the first page of the tour, which stated "Sit back and discover why Morrison & Foerster's site is the legal resource on the internet." We still vote for FindLaw as THE legal resource on the Internet. We suggest that people take the tour, because Morrison & Foerster uses some non-intuitive visual clues in the site. For example, under "What's New," users might not guess that the bullet next to each paragraph is a link to more information. A better approach is to use traditional visual clues such as making the title of each paragraph a hyperlink. This is a major flaw, since there is a great deal of substantive content here under "Industry Areas" and elsewhere. The WAIS search engine was very slow and produced output that was not very helpful. Another novel feature is the "Customized Home Page," which we'd suggest calling "My MoFo." Just kidding. By way of cookies, individual users can create home pages that automatically include updates in practice areas and industry areas of their choosing. When we did this, there appeared to be a slight bug, since the following text was printed at the bottom of our customized page: "COOKIE DEBUG: prevtime is: 909292232 current time: 909292232 lasttime: 0 thecookie: testcook=yes; industry=New Media@; practice=Intellectual Property@; userprefs=blahblah." Yet another novel feature is the "Client Area," which appears to be a password-protected extranet. Attorney profiles were divided into two parts, a "short biography" and a "professional summary." A nontraditional approach that the firm executes nicely. Graphics and page layout are top-notch throughout. But our main complaint is the domain name. For some online slang dictionaries that include the term "mofo," see http://www.ualberta.ca/~ehogg/OLDSKOOL/version2/elingo.html and http://www.intranet.csupomona.edu/~jasanders/com327/no_names.html. |