Burness Paull

Background

Burness Paull is a full-service, independent Scottish law firm with a reputation built on consistently high-quality client service, but their website had started to work against that reputation rather than for it. The existing CMS and hosting setup had become a source of technical debt, limiting the firm's ability to manage content independently and making even routine updates dependent on developer time. For a business where the website is often a prospective client's first real interaction with the firm, that kind of friction matters more than it might elsewhere.

The bigger issue sat beneath the surface. Navigation and user journeys hadn't kept pace with how clients and prospects actually wanted to find information, so visitors could struggle to locate the right service or specialism with any confidence, which in turn affected enquiries and conversions. Burness Paull needed a platform that was robust, secure and scalable enough to support future growth, but they also needed the underlying experience rebuilt around clearer, more intuitive journeys. And critically, whatever solution replaced the old system had to hand genuine control back to the internal Marketing and Business Development teams, so that keeping the site current no longer meant waiting on a developer queue.

Solution

Shout's approach was to break the project into phases, each designed to build a shared understanding of the problem before committing to how it would be solved. The discovery and design phase brought both sides together for a series of workshops covering design and technical requirements alike, working through information architecture, user journey mapping and wireframes before any high fidelity design work began. It meant the eventual solution was grounded in a genuine picture of how Burness Paull's clients actually use the site, rather than assumptions carried over from the old one.

From there, development ran in two-week agile sprints with a prioritised feature backlog, moving through QA and into UAT in a way that kept Burness Paull involved throughout rather than presenting them with a finished product at the end. Umbraco was chosen as the new CMS largely because of what it would mean for the Marketing and Business Development teams day to day, paired with a bespoke composable design library that gave them the flexibility to structure and update content without needing a developer for every change. Hosting moved to Umbraco Cloud with Cloudflare services layered in, which addressed the performance, security and scalability concerns that had been building up under the old infrastructure.

Content migration is typically where projects of this scale encounter the most difficulty, and the complexity here was no different, though the team's approach meant it didn't translate into risk for Burness Paull. The team assessed the existing CMS content in detail, mapped it across to the new structure, and built automated migration scripts to move the bulk of it efficiently while preserving SEO integrity, flagging anything that needed manual handling rather than risking it in an automated pass. Launch itself was treated with the same care, with a cutover plan covering DNS coordination and rollback strategies, a clear stakeholder communications plan, and a four week hypercare period afterwards to catch and resolve anything that surfaced once the site was live.

Impact

The new site gives Burness Paull's clients and prospects a noticeably more intuitive way to find what they need; our navigation changes delivered a 12.5% simpler top-level navigation, while stronger search functionality helping visitors reach relevant information faster. That shift in usability feeds directly into the commercial goals behind the project, with optimised conversion funnels and sharper calls to action designed to turn more of that engagement into enquiries and client interactions.

It’s an outcome that is plain to see in the post-launch analytics; with engagement interactions per active user increased by 2.8%, while homepage CTA interactions per active user increased by 26.7%. Paid Search visitors also demonstrated stronger engagement, with average engagement time increasing by 13.9%.

Internally, the change has been just as significant. With Umbraco in place alongside a design library built specifically for Burness Paull's content needs, the Marketing and Business Development teams now manage and structure content themselves, without waiting on developer support for routine changes. That autonomy, more than any single feature, is what removes the operational drag the old system had created.

The infrastructure sits on Umbraco Cloud with Cloudflare services built in, giving Burness Paull a platform that's positioned to perform reliably under growth and to support whatever third-party integrations or digital expansion comes next, rather than needing another overhaul to get there. An ongoing support and maintenance agreement keeps the site current beyond launch too, with regular security patching and continuous improvement built into how the relationship continues rather than treating go-live as the finish line.