A new year today, nay, a new decade.  2011.  A hundred years ago my grandmother was 7, in those last few years before the Great War.

I very much hope that this century we can avoid such horrors and remain, more or less, at peace.

In my life there are a number of new things.  As mentioned in a previous post, I spent most of last year getting my new Landlord Law web-site ready to launch on the world, and now I have a new toy to play with.  New things beckon, ebooks, podcasts and courses are some of the things I have in mind.  Watch this space.

On a more domestic level, I have celebrated the new year by moving my desk from one side of the office to another.  A difficult job, which has left one of the internet box thingys stranded in the middle of the floor.  The cable (our internet is cable) is too short to reach my desk now, under which the rest of the cables writhe together in decent privacy.  Apparently Virgin are going to need paying £150 to move it over to join them.

One reason for the move (the desk move that is) is to get me away from the draughts coming in through the front door and window, and closer to the fire (and thus hopefully stop my back playing up).  However I feel it also symbolises the change from one web-site to another, to new ways of working, and to new ideas and initiatives.  Towards a greater prosperity I hope.

And then today I learn that my friend and UK Lawyers collaborator Brian Inkster, has started a new blog – the Time Blawg – materialising out of the nether space to take its place among the canon of British Blawgs.  Good luck with it Brian!

This year is of course the year when everything changes in the legal profession, with the coming into force of the Legal Services Act.  None of us know yet whether it will be a bang or a whimper or just a slow burn.  But those firms with foresight are positioning themselves to move forward into the future.

So an interesting year awaits.  I have started the year as I mean to go on, by working on my new web-site and watching old Doctor Who DVDs.

What are your plans and where do you think the new year and decade will take us?

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 …

I can remember, back in 1994 when set up in sole practice, after I had decided to get myself a computer to run it, buying a computer magazine. It was completely incomprehensible. There were all these references to normal sounding things like windows and buses, but they did not make sense. I remember reading a whole article and not understanding a word of it. Something Had To Be Done.

I then went to stay with an old school friend whose husband ran a computer company. I told him about my problems. We decided that what I needed was a book. So we went to Waterstones and I can remember sitting on the floor surrounded by computer books while Kelvin worked out which would be the best one for me.

I read it from cover to cover on the way home on the train (it was quite a long journey), the scales fell from my eyes, and since then I have not had a huge problem. There are and always will be many things I will never be able to understand or do, as I am a solicitor and not a trained computer/software engineer, but somehow I have always managed, eventually, to sort something out.

I think the important thing is to want to do it, and then not to give up. Also remember that the designers of (most) software are writing it (on the whole) for ordinary people to use, not computer genius’s. This means people like us ought to be able to understand it. Once you get in to the way of understanding how things are done in software (there are a lot of conventions and standard ways of doing thing), you can generally sort of find your way through it.

Often once you understand something, you find out that it is not actually as difficult as you thought, and indeed you may wonder what it was you ever found difficult!

NB The book I bought is well out of date by now, but if you are a complete beginner, probably something like Computing For Beginners: The Basics Explained in Plain English would be a good one to start with. It has quite good reviews on Amazon.

Linked in is the big social media service for business.  I joined it quite a while ago now, and although not essential, I think it is a useful service for lawyers.  Certainly it is not as useless as some solicitors I have spoken to seem to think (mostly these are solicitors who have little experience of the internet).

I suppose the main thing it is used for is to keep tabs on your contacts.  Once you are ‘connected’ to someone else on Linkedin, you get kept informed of their activity, such as whether they join a new group, update their profile, or post a status report.

I like this.  For example if I learn that X has a new job I can write (or rather email or send a message via the Linkedin system) and congratulate him, and perhaps wonder if I might want to use his firm sometime.  If Y has joined a new Linkedin group I will take a look at it and see if it is a group I might want to join too.  And the status reports are interesting as they let me know what people are up to.

Likewise my contacts can keep tabs on me, and keep up with what I am doing with my business or otherwise (at least insofar as it is recorded on Linkedin).

I have also through Linkedin, found and re-connected with several people I had lost touch with, which is always nice.

Another interesting aspect is the groups.  This is where you can join in discussions and perhaps through this get to know potential clients and colleagues.  I have not found any clients yet but I suspect that this is only a matter of time.  However I have enjoyed some of the discussions,  particularly those on the Law Society Gazette Group.

If you are a lawyer, have you used Linkedin?  What has been your experience?

NB My Linkedin profile is at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tessashepperson

It will not have escaped the more perspicacious among you that (a) I have not blogged much for a while here and (b) this blog has changed its appearance a bit.

The two are not entirely unconnected.  I started this blog thinking that I might perhaps use it to support a consultancy service (should there be any demand for such a thing) to assist any solicitors who wished to develop their online service.

With this in mind (and also the development of my own services) I started doing a lot more reading about using the internet and social media.  As a result I discovered that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and I am still reading up and researching.

Partly as a result of all this, I decided that I needed to develop my professional Landlord Law Blog (which supports my online Landlord Law service), and change it over to being a self hosted WordPress blog.  This has now been done and the new blog www.landlordlawblog.co.uk went live at the end of November.

The new blog uses the Headway theme (affiliate link) which allowed us much more freedom in its design.  My Headway license provided for me to use the theme for two blogs, so I decided to use it for this blog also (it formerly being a Typepad blog).  Not being a proper web designer like Gill Bishop (who set up and designed my Landlord Law Blog) I have not done as good a job as her.  However, Headway has allowed me to produce a reasonable (albeit perhaps somewhat boring) blog design.   I will be working on this and tweaking it over time as I learn more.

Which I need to do.  Despite having spent much of my spare time this year reading up on the internet and social media, I feel as if I am just at the start of a very long journey.

So this blog is changing direction a bit, and I will now be using it to talk about my research about and work with the internet and social media.  It looks to be an interesting journey.  I hope you will come with me.