The impossible journey

A new year, a new Landlord Law

It started in January.  I decided to change hosting companies and asked my web designer if my website (that is my membership site Landlord Law) could be moved over to the new company I had chosen which is called UK Fast.

Turned out that they couldn’t, so I decided instead to commission the new site that we had been talking about for the past year or so.  It took a while to get a quote out of them (it always does somehow) but by about March time we had a specification and a quotation. And a date for launch.  It was definitely going to be the end of June.

The quotation was, as it always is, more than I expected.  But the service did really need an upgrade and this was to be a completely new site.  My web designer, Gill, decided that Drupal would be the best solution for my service, as Landlord Law is large and complex and Drupal is good for this.

Death in June

March through to June my web designer was doing research and preliminary setting up.  June we planned for me to take a trip to see her (she lives in the West Country), meet the software designer, and move things forward.  Launch, it seemed, could not be the end of June after all, but would probably be by the end of the summer.

Life has a way of intervening in the best laid plans, and very sadly Gills father died just at the time I was due to travel down there (in fact I was on the train when she rang me), and the trip had to be put back.

Needless to say this put a bit of a stop on the project for a few weeks.  However in mid July the West Country trip took place – a good visit, we got a lot done, although on the way back my laptop got destroyed by a bottle of water.

The content transfer begins

August I was able to start working on the site and begin the long job of transferring the content over.  I hadn’t realised quite how much content I had on Landlord Law!  Not only did I have to copy it over, but also to check it and update it where necessary.

At the same time I had to learn Drupal.  Drupal is a brilliant system, really brilliant, but it is not the easiest in the world to get the hang of.  And my web designer is brilliant at web design and creation, not teaching, so I was often having to work things out for myself.  It is probably very good for me (stimulates the brain cells and all that), and I do puzzle things out in the end, but it is not the easiest way to do things.

Gill also had her problems.  This is her first Drupal site, so a lot of learning for her too.  Everything took about twice as long as we thought it would – if we were lucky!

The dreaded document generator

Then there was the document generator software I had commissioned.  This was to be a new way of generating the tenancy agreements, letters and other forms.  I had met the software designer, Joop (he’s Dutch),  on my trip to see Gill, but at that time we had not, much to my disappointment, been able to actually generate a document.

Time went by, ‘When are we going to have the document generator?’ I would ask Gill, and not really get an answer.  Eventually I got some abbreviated instructions which I found completely impossible to follow, and decided to leave it for a bit.

Then one day I decided that I really needed to get a grip on this stuff, so I spent a WHOLE DAY trying to work it out.  Total failure.  Panic started to set in.  The document generator was crucial to the whole new vision for the site, and we could not really launch without it.

I managed to extract a few more instructions, and eventually one day was able to get it to generate a document.  Da daaHH!   However, it was just producing one simple document, and was not functioning as the all singing all dancing product I had been promised.  I carried on transferring content and hoped.

Then one day I had a lightbulb moment and said to Gill, ‘Why don’t we just use the document generator in a simple way, doing one document at a time,  just to get the site launched, and see about the more complicated stuff later’.  From that moment launch once again became a possibility.

Final stuff

So then we were doing the more complex final stuff.  I had to put the tenancy agreements online to be generated.  October had come and passed and we were now moving into November.  Problems were being fixed, but slowly.

I was spending a huge amount of time on decoration and navigation.  Creating blocks to go in the side bar with navigation links (usually created via another complicated procedure in a module called ‘views’), and also lots of blocks with pictures of people.

Old people, young people, white people, black people, Chinese people, smiling people, worried people (not many of them) and happy looking people waving their credit cards in the air and clearly just about to buy a subscription.  It will be interesting to see if they have any effect.

The other thing to do were the legal service instructions.  There is a hideously complex procedure for getting someone to pay the fee and then be  transferred over to an instruction form, and I still have a couple more to do.  Likewise there are a few tenancy agreements which (slapped wrist) I have not done yet.

But we really needed to LAUNCH.  I  had hoped to do this before December but clearly this was not going to be possible.  Gill was still wrestling with the subscriptions procedures and that is pretty fundamental.

Finally last week she said that she had got the subs nailed, and Joop was free to do the membership transfer, so we were on, for launch on Tuesday.

Launch?

That was today.  The membership details have now been moved, although it took Joop ALL DAY to do it.  I suppose there are rather a lot of them, Landlord Law has been online since November 2001.  We now need to get the nameservers switched so the landlord law url points at UK Fast rather than the Bitenet server where it is now.

I am hoping that will get done tomorrow.

A new year, a new Landlord Law

So it has really taken almost the whole year (give or take a few weeks) to get to almost launch.  A year in which I seem to have worked on and thought about very little else.

But it is a fabulous site, and hopefully when you are reading this, it will be online so you will be able to see it >> here.

It will be good to release it into the wild to see how it does, and I will finally be able to start working on something else.  New developments which I have had in mind for months, new products to enhance the site and encourage signups, exciting new multimedia marketing initiatives, more feedback and contact with my members, and a new way of working.

Did I tell you that it will probably be the first social media online subscription service offered by a solicitors firm in the UK, ever?  And this is only the beginning …