When I first glanced through the legal guide Membership Agreement Samples: The Definitive Guide, I was surprised by how well structured the content seemed both a written document, and as a page for a website. Reflecting on why this might be, I recalled many aspects of legal documents, contracts and agreement forms, seem very similar to the structure of web pages and the way people build basic websites.
What makes Legal Text So Structurally Sound? When we are creating a legal contract, it is something we do not take lightly. We will have lawyers go through it, revisions and additions will be made until we have a legal binding document that is as clear and organized as possible. The legal version of a membership agreement sample is something you want to make sure covers all your bases in case a legal issue one day arises. The structure of almost any legal document has a very similar pattern. Almost all legal documents have sections, subsections, bullet points and paragraphs that help divide the content of the document into logical groupings. Down to an individual bullet point, these small tidbits of information neatly grouped together within a section help to make the bulk of an agreement much easier to digest for a human being to read, at the same time as allow yourself to structure them properly to be covered by law. This is one of the most difficult areas of law to comprehend, as a human being more times than not will not be able to understand the different parts of a contract and where they fit into the entire context of the document. With that in mind, when we structure these documents we create logical groupings of paragraphs, bullet points, and underlined sections to make the documents much easier to comprehend.
How This Crosses Over To Working With WordPress If we expect that our legal documents have a very specific structure that we need to be able to follow and understand, naturally the same sort of structured approach will work with web-structure, as it creates a logical and knowable way for a human to follow a page around the internet. If we take a similar principle in mind, a web designer can create as structured and compelling of a website as a legal document. In terms of the structure of a website, this can mean using headers and subheaders throughout a page, putting down visible sections of tightly grouped text, using bullet points at certain intervals, creating sub-sections of text, using images and graphics in logical places, and sectioning off content with bullets to guide a reader through a document. This is much more effective on web pages, as compared to normal paper documents, as on the internet you cannot force someone to read your content, especially in an age of short attention spans thanks to social media. A compelling website is all about engaging your audience with logical divisions of structure and paragraphs, which makes an ideal background for many situations.
Parallax Pro Will Help You Present More Structured Content With the parallax pro theme you can create a very structured website that will draw your audience in, and help you keep them engaged. It has a sticky menu that will allow you to scroll through the sections of whatever you are displaying with ease, and fits beautifully on any screen you choose to use. The parallax pro theme comes with all the toggles you would expect from a membership agreement sample, or any other piece of legal documentation. The layout of this website will give you very visible sections, spliced images, and lots of structured information that flows across the page of the theme, creating an experience that will compel anyone who visits your page to engage with your content, and really find themselves drawn into the topic at hand.
More Customization As all webmasters will discover eventually, every single situation will be different when dealing with a client, and every situation will require certain customizations to get the layout just right. This is further proved by the parallax pro theme, as it is highly customizable and allows you to change up various elements of the theme without requiring you to learn coding. With that said, you should also be able to customize the legal terms of a sample contract to fit into the layout of a website. Any issues you face will be minor enough to fix with some simple customization of the layout. Headers, footers, sidebar and main body are highly easy to control with parallax pro, and you can easily add text sections and image sections into the layout as you see fit.
Using Legal Text To Create Better Websites With any legal document you will find well read sections, and poorly read sections. Those sections that are harder to read are usually the ones we cannot digest within the context of the entire document, while the easier to read sections are those we can digest very quickly. This is exactly the same concept we can expect from a website, as we adopt the same structure for any website in general. Headers, bullet points, paragraphs and sub-paragraphs, sub-sections and sections, and image blocks all play vital roles in making sure a website contains content that is easy to understand as well as how it flows. Using the intuition you have from the legal world, you can apply these same principles to the design of a regular website to keep your audience engaged with the subject matter, and interested in learning more about the information presented.