I like to be able to move around my blog easily.  And for a long time I have been really annoyed by the fact that there were no ‘next post’ or ‘previous post’ links at the bottom of my blog posts.

This is present on many sites automatically, but not on mine.  I use the Headway theme, which in many respects very good.  However, when I asked a question about this on their forum, I did not get much help (their forum help is not all it is cracked up to be).  So it was left to me to go rummaging around to see what I could find.

Searches in the plugin’s directory brought forth a few which looked promising, but none of them did what I wanted.  I liked the WP-PageNavi plugin though, so decided to keep that one (and added it to my other blogs). But how to get the previous/next post links? Time to visit the Word Press Codex.

The WP Codex is a great site which has lots and lots of technical information about using, hacking, repairing, doing anything really with a wordpress site. I am slightly hampered of course by not being a developer and not having had any training in php. However I managed to find a page (which you will find here) which gave me some code to make the links.

But where do you put them? On the files. Happily, if you need to do this yourself,  you do not have to download and upload files via ftp or (in my case) cpanel, as you can get at them via your WP administration area. In the appearance section there is a link to a page called Editor. There you will find pages with all that puzzling code. Take a look at the index on the right. The one you want is called Single Post (single.php).

Get the page up and put this code in a suitable place (you may need to mess around a bit):

<?php previous_post('&laquo; &laquo; %', '', 'yes'); ?>
| <?php next_post('% &raquo; &raquo; ', '', 'yes'); ?>

Yes I know it looks peculiar, but you don’t have to understand it, just copy and paste it.  Then go to your page and refresh.  Voila!  You can see it right at the bottom of this page (assuming you are looking at the post page).

“But”  hear you say “there is only one link”.  Thats because you are looking at the most recent post.  There is only one link – your last post.  Go back a few posts and you will see them both.  But yes, that worried me too for a while.

Needless to say I then went off to put in the links on all my other blogs.  I had a bit of a problem however with my Lodger Landlord blog, as that uses the most recent version of Headway.  The one with the visual editor.

The Headway visual editor, I have found, is brilliant, until it suddenly stops working, and you can’t get it going again (and the Headway forum are no help).  Not only, I have found, can you no longer edit much of the appearance of your blog, you also can’t edit single.php.  Because it ain’t there.

So the Lodger Landlord does not have the previous post/next post links.  But all the others do, and I am dead chuffed that I have managed to do a bit of coding all on my own (with a bit of help from the Codex of course).  But even so, I don’t think I’ll give up the day job yet …

Have you had a go at anything like this?  How did you get on?

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Apart from  aesthetic values, I think it is very important to have a good favicon.  Why?  Because it helps develop your brand:

• With many browsers (such as Internet Explorer and Firefox) the favicons appear in the tabs, so you can more easily locate sites with recognisable favicons
• They also appear next to the links on booksmarks (including online books marks)
• Apparently links with recognisable favicons get clicked more often

Creating a favicon

A favicon is 16 pixels wide so its design has to be simple to stand out.  Complex logos don’t work.  There are sites where you can upload an image (such as your regular logo) and it will turn it into a favicon for you.  However these  often turn out blurry.  I think the best favicon creation sites are those which allow you to adapt the image, or to create one from scratch.

The site I used to create the S favicon for this site was www.favicon.cc.  This gives you a palette with the 16 x 16 canvas and a colour generator to paint with (see the picture above).

It took quite a bit of messing around to get the S favicon.  I initially made the whole square dark blue.  Colours have numbers when you are creating them on the web, and the number for the dark blue surround I use is #171D86.  White is #ffffff.  I then did quite a few different combinations of the letters SOLB or SOB or SB, none of which really  worked.  I finally put a white border just inside the square and put in the one S which looked much better.

I also created a suitcase favicon for my Lodger Landlord site – it is more of a gladstone bag look than the ‘proper’ case logo, but I think it looks quite nice.  It seems to stand out quite nicely too.

Putting them on your site

If you use the Headway theme, as I do, you can add it to the Headway Configuration page (load the favicon up to the media library and then use the link you will find there).  However I prefer the MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin.

Its a bit of a faff, as its not one you can upload from the wordpress plugins page. You have to download the file from the MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin page, and then upload the php file (no, I don’t really know what that means either) directly to the server. It goes in the wp-content/plugins folder. You can do this by fpt, or I use the file manager facility provided by my ISP Ecowebhosting.  Then, after you have activated it, you need to tell it where to find the favicon to display, in the special admin area. NB If you find it stops your site showing, go to the advanced options section and click the other radio button.

You have to register with MaxBlogPress which means you get put on the mailing list, but its worth it as it is a superior plugin. I like it because you get the icon on the bookmark for the admin area as well as for the site itself, which helps me (as I have quite a few blogs now, and I put them all in the same bookmarks section).

So there you are.  If you want to read more about favicons online, see the post on Blogussion here, and the links that they give.

What do you think about favicons? Have you ever noticed them? If you decide to add a favicon to your site as a result of this post, please let me know how you got on!

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Blogs have been around for some time, and most people are familiar with them. There are hundreds of millions of them around, ranging from blogs with just a few posts which no-one wants to read by someone no-one has ever heard of, to highly influential blogs read by millions every day.

Most newspapers will have at least one blog, and some will have many, kept by their journalists on particular topics, for example The Times and The Guardian. Perhaps the most popular of these is the American Huffington Post blog. Many TV channels will also have blogs, for example Robert Peston of the BBC and Jon Snow of Channel Four.

Many businesses now have blogs. Some will be anodyne company speak which will be largely ignored, others will be interesting and worth reading. You may have a blog for your firm. Many solicitors firms do now. I have written the Landlord Law Blog for my business since February 2006.

Many of the best known blogs are anonymous. Most of you will have heard of the blog by Belle de Jour, a London call girl. This became so famous that it was published as a book, and there has been a TV show based on it starring Billie Piper. Another anonymous blog recently in the news was that written by Night Jack, a policeman who told it like it was, which was closed down after The Times discovered and published his identity (after a court case seeking to preserve his identity failed).

There are many anonymous legal blogs, for example Nearly Legal which covers housing law cases, Geeklawyer an intellectural property barrister, and Baby Barista who blogs for The Times. Law Blogs are sometimes called Blawgs, for obvious reasons.

Although there are many more lawyers blogging now, we have come fairly late to the blogging scene. When I started there were just a handful, mainly John Bloches excellent Family Lore blog, The Charon QC blog, and Geeklawyer. There are far more legal bloggers (as you would expect) in America. Two well known ones are Susan Cartier Liebel’s Solo Practice blog (and since I first knew her, her consultancy for sole practitioners has turned into a University) and Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

But why write a blog? This will be looked at in future posts

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The standard way of doing this is by offering a ‘free’ newsletter. This must offer something of value, or people will not sign up. Most contain news items, articles and tips on the newsletter subject matter, and general information about the firm (i.e. new services, staff members, etc).

I have run a newsletter for years. I have two, one for members of my Landlord-Law service (a subscription site providing information and resources for private residential landlords and tenants), and a free one which anyone can sign up to. Although in point of fact they are actually more or less the same. The chief difference is that the members version cuts out the paragraph suggesting that they join up!

The main reasons why people like my newsletters are the tips (one for landlords and one for tenants) which are always at the top, and the news section. Readers appreciate being kept up to date and made aware of significant legal changes in their area of work or interest.

There are many landlords and tenants (and letting agents and solicitors) who signed up for my free newsletter who have subsequently gone on to become a full member of my service. However often this has only been after several years, so don’t expect results immediately. It is a long term thing.

If you are planning on doing a newsletter, it is best to deal with a specific area of work or client type (as mine is mainly for landlords). You can then concentrate on information and news which are important to your readers.   I find that the prospect of having to write monthly news items also makes me more aware and noticing of what is going on in my field. Which is beneficial for me as a specialist.

I think a general firm newsletter is less likely to succeed. People’s time is precious today and they will only want to read a newsletter if it is relevant to them. On the whole, people are not interested in your latest charity fundraising activities, the fact that you have three new secretaries, or your latest web-site makeover. What they are really interested in is “are there any new legal developments out there which will affect me or my business?”

If you are the person to inform them of a new legal development, and if at the same time you tell them about a new service you are offering to help them deal with it, they are more likely to come to you than another firm.

So the best way forward is to decide on which areas of law and practice your firm wishes to major in and provide a newsletter for that (although for larger firms there is no reason why you should not do two or even three specialist newsletters).

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I have been ‘twittering’ for a few months now. In many ways it is a bit of a timewaster. However I have discovered the following ways it can be usefully used:

• to make announcements about new services being launched
• to keep clients up to date with other firm news
• to make announcements about new legal developments
• to make announcements when you post a new item on your blog (NB there are ways of doing this automatically)

With twitter, you follow other ‘twitterers’ and are followed by others in turn. Often they are the same people, but not necessarily. One way you can make yourself known to other people is to ‘follow’ them (you do this by visiting their profile and clicking the follow button). They then get an email telling them that you are now following them. The hope is that they will then be prompted to visit your profile, and follow you in turn. They will then read your tweets and may end up being a client!

This could happen. However many people seem only concerned to get as many followers as possible. If you are following several thousand people you probably won’t have much time to read everything (or perhaps anything). Also if someone follows you, there is no guarantee that they will always follow you. It is very easy to ‘unfollow’ someone by re-visiting their profile and clicking the follow button again.

Twitter is also a very ‘in the moment’ service. If you log in to your twitter account at 5.50 pm you are unlikely to scroll back as far as to read the tweets published in the morning (unless you only follow a handful of people in which case there may not be many tweets to read). Therefore if you make an announcement about, say, a new service, it will only be read by those who are online at or shortly after the time it is published. One way around this is to ‘tweet’ it again later. However you don’t want to do this too often or you will start to annoy people.

Twitter can also be useful in keeping you informed. Virtually all the newspapers now have twitter accounts and you can subscribe to those which interest you. For example I follow a number of twitter accounts from the Times and the Guardian and a number of legal information services. You can also follow people who write blogs you admire, so you will be informed when they write a new post.

However although my twitter experience has been mainly a positive one, Larry Bodine, a legal marketing blogger in the USA, believes that it is not an effective marketing tool for law firms. He points out that it generates a lot of leads but little sales, can get lawyers and firms in a lot of trouble in the event of litigation, and is a distraction to getting real marketing work done. He goes on to say:

“After months of using Twitter, I’ve learned that it is a shouting post for relentless self-promoters, a dumping ground for press releases and advertising, an ego-driven competition to amass followers, and a target for computer-automated Tweets.  It’s always been a good place to learn what sandwich someone had for lunch and when someone changed a baby’s diapers.  But Twitter is supposed to be “all about the conversation,” and I see few conversations that lead to new business.”

I have to say that there is a lot of truth in this, and personally cannot put my hand on my heart (at the time of writing this) and point to any new client who has specifically come to me via twitter (although a number of existing clients have joined twitter just so they can follow my tweets).

Although I accept that there is a lot of truth in what Larry Bodine says, I still think that twitter is worth persevering with. However, it is for each firm to make their own decision.

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