(This is an article which was first published in the Internet Newsletter)

The internet is becoming increasingly important for all businesses and law is not exempt from this.

I have been fascinated by the Internet ever since I discovered, on buying my first computer when setting up as a sole practitioner in 1994, that there was this thing called the internet, where computers could talk to each other through telephone lines.

I truly believe that over the next 100 years it will bring in changes of the same magnitude as those brought in by the development of the printing press and the telegraph. Already we are able to collaborate with colleagues in real time wherever they are in the world; blogging allows us all to be journalists and the growing popularity of ebooks allows us all to become publishers.

In this new world, the sole practitioner solicitor has a big advantage over his colleagues in larger firms. He (or in my case she) can develop new ideas and services without having to get them past hostile partners. My partnership meetings (of one) are invariably harmonious and generally productive!

If you have a good idea, it is possible, if you have the right skills or a good web designer, to get it online within days or in some cases, hours.

So how can the sole practitioner (or small firm lawyer) take advantage of the opportunities presented by the internet?

The membership site

I set up my membership site, Landlord Law ten years ago. At that time, I had to get bespoke software specially written, but nowadays membership sites can be built fairly easily from open source software such as WordPress and Drupal (the software Landlord Law uses).

If you are a techie, you may even be able to create your own site, using WordPress and plugins. There are courses online to help you do this sort of thing.

What can you provide in a membership site? My site, Landlord Law, is aimed at landlords, tenants, letting agents and housing advisors. The services provided fall into the following groups:

• Information – e.g. FAQ, articles and the like
• Documents – tenancy agreements, notices, standard letters etc
• One to one help – principally provided via the members discussion forum but I also ‘sell’ fixed fee telephone and written advice
• Casework. I offer standard repossession work, for fixed fees.

When Landlord Law was launched in 2001 case work was the biggest part of my income. Now it is the membership subscriptions which are more important.

I am lucky in having a small discrete area of law which lends itself to this subscription service model. However it is not the only one. Have a think about your practice. Is there any specific area where clients would appreciate (and pay for) an online service to keep them up to date?

Where you could also provide precedent documents and give some quick advice in a forum? Most people don’t want a great long written opinion, they just want a quick pointer, or perhaps a bit of reassurance that they are on the right path. You can do this really easily in a forum – and your answers will also help the other members and enrich the site generally.

An online instruction facility for basic case work is also worthwhile. For standard repossession cases it is not necessary for clients to come in and talk to me about it. All they need to do is give details and send over the documents so I can get on with it. My service also requires payment in advance. This means no bad debts which is a considerable saving in time and irritation.

Some case work requires more client contact than this of course, but I expect you do at least some work which would fit this model.

Blogging

It is no good just putting up a membership site and expecting hundreds of members. You have to market it and one of the best ways to do this is with a blog.

When people are considering paying for a service, they like to know a bit about the person or company providing it. A blog lets you show that you ‘know your stuff’ and are a suitable person to help them.

It will also help raise your profile generally, in particular in the search engines. Inevitably your articles will have ‘keywords’ relevant to your service, making you easy to find for someone searching for information in your niche.

There is a lot of writing involved in keeping a blog though. You also need to write in an ‘easy’ style which ordinary people will understand. You don’t want to come across as a pompous fusty lawyer type, as this will put people off.

(Note, you can see my ‘professional blog’ Landlord Law Blog here.

Audio and video

Writing is not the only option. You can record and publish audio ‘podcasts’. This is surprisingly easy to do, and the podcasts can be promoted via your blog and registered on itunes. People can then subscribe and download your podcasts regularly.

Lots of people enjoy listening to podcasts, for example in the car, while walking the dog, at the gym etc. Through listening to your voice regularly they will come to feel they know you, making you an obvious choice if they need legal help.

Or what about ‘vlogging’ – Video blogging? If you have a camcorder you can set this up on a tripod and speak to the nation regularly, updating them with news and comment on your niche. This can easily be published on your blog. You can also set up your own Your Tube channel and publish it there. It’s really not that difficult.

Twitter

People often think twitter must be silly, because of its name, and how can you say anything sensible in 140 characters? Actually you would be surprised but that’s not the point. If you have a blog, you need a twitter account because it is an important way to promote your blog posts.

A vast amount of twitter traffic consists of people either publishing a ‘tweet’ about their new blog post, or recommending (or ‘re-tweeting’) someone else’s blog post. You need to become a part of this. It needn’t take a lot of time (although it can do if you are not careful).

As a sole practitioner you have an advantage in that you can tweet for your business under your own name. People like to follow a real person with a real photo in their twitter profile.

Let’s talk technical

Blogs are quite easy to set up. You can set up a blog using the free Google software on Blogger in a couple of hours. However if you are serious about blogging it is best to have a self hosted blog, maybe as part of your firm website.

WordPress is the most popular blogging software. Many web hosting companies provide it for free and you can install it with just a couple of clicks. You then need to customise it with a ‘theme’ to give it an individual look.

I use a brilliant premium theme called Headway (affilate link), which has a ‘visual editor’ allowing you to change the appearance of your site without using code. You can further customise your blog with bits of add on software called ‘plugins’ of which there are thousands, for all kinds of purpose.

Or you can just commission your web designer to create a bespoke website and leave it at that, but I find that half the fun is messing about and tweaking my site.

Newsletters

As well as writing your blog, and giving out useful nuggets of information to your followers on twitter, you should produce a regular newsletter.

This performs a number of functions. It keeps you in the forefront of your clients mind, making you (hopefully) the obvious choice for legal work if they need it. You can also use it to sell your services and any products you may decide to produce (see later).

However remember that it is all too easy for people to consign your newsletter to the spam folder. Once this is done, all future newsletters will go there automatically, so they simply won’t see them. Try not to do anything which would make them want to do this.

If you decide to set up a newsletter it is a good idea to use one of the specialist companies such as Constant Contact, Aweber or Mailchimp. If you are worried about producing content there are firms out there who will do this for you, such as www.words4business.com.

Be your own publisher

If you write a book nowadays, you do not need to worry about publishers. You can do it yourself! With the growing popularity of kindle, ipad and other ebook readers, people are increasingly buying ebooks rather than paper books, and they are not hard to create.

The ebook can either be given away for free, maybe as an incentive to get people to sign up to your mailing list, or be sold via your website to form an extra income stream.

Many people sell their ebooks using an online service called ‘e-junkie’ which is fairly easy to use and very cheap. Alternatively you can add a shopping cart to your blog or website. You will need one which will allow you to sell digital downloads.

I have set up a whole new ecommerce business recently with my web designer specifically to sell my ebooks and kits, which we produce ourselves called Your Law Store. This has already started to make a modest profit

Conclusion

With the ever increasing complexity of our world, people are crying out for easy ways to understand information about the regulations which affect their daily lives. Lawyers are the best people to provide this. The internet is the perfect medium for providing it, promoting it, and selling it.

If you are a sole practitioner who likes writing, has keyboard skills and enjoys messing around with computers, the world is your oyster!

The British blawg / law blog

Welcome to the June 2011 UK Blawg review, a quarterly round up of British Blawgs (legal blogs) and discussion.

In the last Blawg Reivew, Brian Inkster took the past as his theme. Speaking from his newly materialised Time Blawg, he took us on a journey back into the mists of 2006 (or even earlier), before whisking us back again to see where those original bloggers were today.

Today I am going to see if the UK Blawg time rotor can give us a peek into the future. One of the things I will be looking at is whether blogs are just a frivolous fancy, or whether they can be a serious support to a law practice.

Because this is the year when everything changes. Deregulation is coming in October (2011) as the Legal Services Act 2007 finally comes into force. Lawyers (they say) are going to be forced to do things differently. Will blogging be a part of this new future?

I start with a serious and thought provoking post, the time is now from Viv Williams on Legal Futures which discusses the problems raised by deregulation and the options available to law firms. Well worth reading if you are a law firm principal. We all need to think about these things.

But back to blogging.

#Lawblogs

Blogging inspires passion among its practitioners, and there have been several law blog events, none of which sadly I have been able to attend (living as I do in the wilds of Norfolk – or Norwich as many people call it). The most recent event took place on 19 May 2011 and had as its theme the future of legal blogging.

It appears to have been well attended and was reported online by Siobhain Butterworth of the Guardian who commented that “blawgs seems to be in blossom”. (It was also reported in the Times but I can’t show you that as it is behind their paywall).

The event brought forth an interesting crop of blogs on what the future of legal blogging might be.

James Wilson writing on Halsburys Law Exchange  feels that legal blogging ensures more debate about the rules that govern us, and keeps better scrutiny on those who make and enforce them, which has to be a good thing

Adam Wagner writing on the UK Human Rights Blog  is more concerned about the ethical side of blogging – do lawyers have a duty to correct errors in the press about legal cases, and explain the law to the general public?

Law student Dylan White found the event inspiring and thinks that the current crop of law students is the future of blogging

Emily Albon writing on Lawbore Future Lawyer  thinks it is a great way for law students to show their engagement with the subject, and has many benefits to the student blogger, not least helping them find a job in due course.

But, firmly grasping the commercial nettle in his canny Scottish fist, Brian Inkster asks is law firm business development the elephant in the #LawBlogs room?  A question answered in part in the vigorous debate which followed in the comments section. Brian’s posts generally attract vigorous comments – a sign of a good blog.

So we have a number of themes identified there:

• Providing informed comment on legal topics and news items
• Educating the public
• Correcting reporting errors
• Keeping a scrutiny on law makers and enforcers
• Supporting a law firm / promoting the writer

I think I would add to that, writing for the love of it. Anybody who chooses to write a blog and keeps it up for more than a year, must enjoy writing or they wouldn’t bother with it.

So lets go look at British law bloggers blogs and see what they are doing.

The top ten blogs of 2011

Where can we find law blogs? One place I discovered recently is Cisions list of top ten Law Blogs.  Cisions is a resource for PR and communications professionals – lets see which blogs they put at the top. In reverse order:

No 10 is Pangloss from Lillian Edwards, Professor of E-Governance at The Law School of Strathclyde University who writes on online privacy and security law, cybercrime, online intermediary law, etc etc. Recent posts include Do you want to know a secret about twitter and superinjunctions and Return of the Robots! and Hay on Wye Festival! which looks at re-drawing (Sci fi writer) Asimov’s laws of robotics.

No 9 is Pink Tape – a blog from Lucy Read of the family bar. She covers all manner of things, from a talk by HH Judge Bellamy (not y’know, the wildlife bloke, but the other one), to legal blogging goes boom

No 8 is my blog - The Landlord Law Blog. Here I mostly have educational posts for landlords / tenants such as What can you do if your tenant just WON”T GO!, and comments on news items such as Tenancy Deposits – the law that never was plus there is the newish blog clinic where I publish readers problems, such as International students still waiting for their deposit after three months

No 7 is the Marilyn Stowe Blog – a very professional looking blog and the winner of the UK Blawg awards 2010 no less! This is a family law blawg – and she has recently considered what makes a good family law blogger , as well as looking at Michelle Obamas sound relationship advice and how to avoid the CSA.

No 6 is Law Actually an amusing blog from “a typically deranged law graduate, with a poor taste in blogging and too much spare time on his hands” who in between posts works in-house for a wholesale business telcoms operator. He serves up an entertaining mix of commentary such as Woman goes hyper at dunkin donuts, lawyer in waitering funds law degree by dropping trousers and the unfortunate (although probably fictitious) story of  Employees & the right to erm … play at work.

No 5 is the well respected Head of Legal blog from barrister and former government worker Carl Gardner. I can remember Head of Legal from way back in the early days of legal blogging. He comments on legal stories in the news such as can the Danes ban Marmite? and Mosely v. UK.

No 4 is the UK Human Rights Blog – from barristers chambers One Crown Office Way publishing several human rights posts daily. This blog burst upon the blawgosphere fairly recently but is up there with the best. Recent posts include  why religious freedom does not stop at the prison gate and how the police may have a duty to inform victims of phone hacking .

No 3 is Tim Kevan’s barristers blog. This is fairly self promotional at the moment with lots of posts about reviews of his book and a few sponsored posts and book reviews.

No 2 is the Magistrates Blog – another long running and very well respected blog. The Magistrates Blog is anonymous and and all names in cases are changed. A recent oddments from the front line post had a very sad and telling comment from a South London JP on the day his court closed and the insensitivity of HMCTS, and plate sin with gold looks at the nature of theft.

The top spot (cue drum roll) is taken by Charon QC, an enormously popular legal blog which has been around for a very long time. Charon QC himself apparently does not exist (so how come he does all those podcasts then?) but is a figment in the imagination of law lecturer Mike Semple Piggot.

In view of this it is perhaps not surprising that in a recent post the learned QC (or maybe his alter ego) had a few things to say about the new college of humanities. Other recent posts include episodes from the continuing story of that ever popular and ethically rock sold law firm Muttley Dastardly LLP plus various law reviews, for example on Legal tweeters on TV – Miscarriages of Justice – Politicians interfering with the judiciary?

Charon QC is probably the best known of all the legal blogs, partly because it has been around for such a long time, but mainly of course because it is a stonking good blog.

So thats the Cisions top ten for May 2011. Its also interesting to see what their top ten was the last time they reviewed law blogs in September 2009.   All of the blogs listed are still going (albeit some maybe in a slightly different format).

The top ten blogs of 2009

Here the countdown was as follows:

No 10 – PJH Law – an employment law blog, rather difficult to find from their sites home page, recent posts include wasted costs – acting in pursuit of profit and payment in lieu

No 9 – Family Lore from John Bloch – John is a long established and well known family law blogger, and I was surprised not to see him in the 2011 list. I have a soft spot for Family Lore as it was reading this which inspired me to start blogging way back in 2006. Recent posts include one on how divorces can be aimiable and one about a considerably less amiable couple spying on each other on facebook His blog is also home to the family law wiki.

No 8 – Yay! Me again! – Landlord Law Blog

No 7 - Current awareness from the Inner Temple Library. This seems to be mostly extracts from online news reports and links to them. Looks like it could be a good source of stories for the law humour blogs.

No 6 – the Barrister Blog (Tim Kevan) again

No 5 – Nearly Legal. I know the Nearly Legal blog very well as it deals with my area of law, ie Landlord and Tenant, although NL covers all the social housing cases whereas I just do the private sector. Nearly Legal himself is actually a good example of how writing a blog can help with your career. He started it back in 2006 while unqualified (hence ‘nearly legal’) and has since qualified and works now at a good London legal aid firm (I was going to say a quality firm but that word is now perhaps best avoided).

Nearly Legal is now written by a team of solicitors and barristers (including the original NL) and provides what is more or less a legal reporting service on case law in the housing area. It is hugely respected and rightly so. Generally the reporting is straight and serious, but I commend to you Hot tub lovin’, the Daily Mail and Article 8 (don’t ask) and Oh Cluck where NL considers setting up a specialist hen and rabbit practice.

No 4 – panGLos (as aforesaid)

No 3 – Baby Barrista from Tim Kevan – formerly in the Times but now (since the paywall came in)  in the Guardian and on its own site here. This as everyone will know is the account of a fictional junior barrister. Recently he has been considering selling off the Inns of court and upholding the rule of law.

No 2 – Binary Law from publishing consultant Nick Holmes (who also produces, with Delia Venables, the excellent Internet Newsletter and who initiated the Free Legal Web). Nick has probably been blogging longer than any of us, as he set up in February 2004!   Nick tends to concentrate on publishing related posts such as Innovations in law publishing and the death of (some) print but of particular interest to us today is his post Too many #LawBlogs?

The no. 1 post in 2009 was the excellent  Magistrates Blog, so not a lot of change there as it is No 2 now.

Some more blogs

A few (well quite a lot really) other notable blogs I need to mention are as follows

The Jack of Kent blog, from London lawyer and writer provides intellectual comment on the news, with some philosophical musing thrown in. Posts range from legal gags on Wikileaks to whether Pippa Middleton should have a page on Wikipedia (answer, yes).

Trouble Ahead from Mike Scutt is specifically about UK legal services deregulation. Recent posts include the The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Legal Services Act and countdown to the LSA where he provides a handy list of acronyms.

Mike also blogs as Jobsworth on his legal specialism Employment law where he asks whether the government should cap discriminaton awards and whether stressed workers are more at risk of redundancy.

Legaleaglemhm is from Scottish law student Michelle containing her diary of a trainee solicitor.  A recent post includes Legaleaglemhm TOP TIPS for Law EXAM revision

Julian Summerhayes is a solicitor turned coach / consultant and blogs about legal practice and social media. Recent posts include why lawyers hate the telephone and people learning and development

In house lawyer looks at how lawyers can uses social media to best effect, for example looking at what Linkedin map says about Linkedin and reflecting on contract law

Alrichs weblog from journalist Alan Rich looks at legal related items in the news such as the Jonathan Sumption debacle and Privacy, human rights, horizontality and the issue of judicial underwear

Steven Mather has a rather snazzy blog which covers legal, mediation and geeky issues among others.  He is asking if chimps are more intelligent than most under 16s and looks at Ken Clarke’s plans for compulsory mediation of small claims.

piBlawg from 1 Chancery Lane covers personal injury issues eg we are the village green preservation sociey, God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety and the fashon for fraud

The William Flack Blog is another housing law blog from social welfare lawyer William Flack, who is wondering if the telephone gateway to legal aid services is a good thing and has a few thoughts on Sharon Shoesmiths sucessful appeal. William has also set up a social welfare law wiki

Paul Hajek’s Clutton Cox site has a number of different property related blogs, for example a post on setting up home with an unmarried partner and the perils of undervalued probate properties

Legal 2.0 is from Jon Busby, Business Development Director at Epoq Legal. He wants to know if you want the truth or somethig beautiful and talks about how legal tech can do much more than make you accessible (well he would wouldn’t he?)

The LegalBratBlawg is from Tim Bratton general counsel at the Financial Times, who has recently looked at the case for self regulation – however I found his white font on dark background blog very difficult to read – am I alone in this?

John Floods Random Academic Thoughts is another long established blog, recently he has been telling us that we might not have realised that the world was ending,  and looking at risk management in from father confessor to compliance officer

Law and lawyers from Obiter J looks at legal issues in the news and is currently running a very helpful series our law and the legal system, the most recent post being on the Judges

The Bizzie is an in house lawyer who has been considering how aliens can help you write off your debts and the state of the union

Motoring lawyers online blog supports Steve Williams online motoring law service and discusses relevant issues such as drink drive limits to remain the same and drink driving defences

Likewise Shireen Smiths Blog supports her trademark / copyriight law practice – recent posts include twitter etiquette – twitiquette and innovation as differentiation

Jonathan Lea’s Posterious blog is more of a place where he thinks aloud – currently he is wondering if social media can replace the banks and considering the future of law firms.

Penninsulawyer is from Jon Bloor in the Wirral, where he is looking at format shifting copyright and the cloud and the differences between writing for print and screen (if you blog – just read it!).

The Pain Smith landlord and tenant blog is very well known to me, working as we do in the same field, and is full of excellent posts, and sometimes breaking news of their own cases. For instance in the Potts v. Dansley Pays case. It is also, like many blawgs, reminding people that Bailii is appealing for funds.

Finally, I would like to include a blog which I have enjoyed for some years, Technollama. The author, formerly a lecturer at University of Edinburgh School of Law has now returned to his ancestral acres in Costa Rica but as his blog remains as entertaining as ever, I venture to include it.  For example in a recent post on the internet nobody knows youre a meme he has some excellent advice for dealing with strangers on the internet.  He also wonders if we should have any expectations of privacy in the internet age.

Pause for reflection

So, having had a whistle stop tour around the legal blogosphere (with apologies to anyone who has accidentially been left out), what does it say about blogging and the future of the profession?

There is as we have seen a huge range of blogs, running from the mostly commercial, which are mainly about the authors products, to the blogs (particularly the anonymous ones) which are written purely for the love of it with no expectation of reward..

There are numerious examples of blogs dealing with all the themes identified at #lawblogs, with many blogs falling into more than one catetory. Lets take a look.

Providing informed comment on legal topics and news items

Most blogs do this to some extent or other. Some are humorous such as Law Actually, and some mainly comment on political and current news items, for example Head of Legal blog and Alrichs weblog. Others keep readers up to date in their particular field, such as the Pain Smith blog and Technolama.

Educating the public

Most blawgs consider this to be one of their main raison d’être. For example if you want to know what it is like being a Magistrate – read the Magistrates blog. If you want to know want the top human rights issues are today – read the UK Human Rights blog.  If you want to know what its like being a trainee solicitor, read LeagleagleMHM’s diary of a trainee solicitor.

For those of us who blog under our own or our firms name, it is not entirely altruistic. ‘Content marketing’ as it is called, is a proven method of marketing. It consists providing useful and helpful content to the public on the basis that it will raise the bloggers profile (and the profile of their business) and improve their chances of survival in a hostile world.

For example, my Landlord Law blog publishes a lot of educational material, as does Steve Williams Motoring lawyers online.  Then, some excellent blogs are written with lawyers as potential customers in mind, for example Julian Summerhayes and Legal 2.0 from Jon Busby.

Free Legal Web. On the theme of education, I must mention again the innovative and rather wonderful  Free Legal Web. This collects legal articles and blogs published around the blogosphere and publishes them all in one place to make life easier for the seeker after legal knowledge.

The FLW is presently concentrating on housing law, and the three main housing blogs (Nearly Legal, Pain Smith and my own – although we are not the only contributors) all have special categories on our blogs for FLW so posts can easily be uploaded to the beta housing law pilot. However I believe Nick has plans to extend FLW to other areas of law. You can read more about it all here.

Correcting reporting errors

The barristers blogs do a very good job with this, for example the Human Rights Blog and Nearly Legal (although NL has both barrister and solicitor writers). However there are sometimes restrictions on what barristers can say about their own cases – discussed by Adam Wagner on the UK Human Righsts blog here.

Keeping a scrutiny on law makers and enforcers

Lawyers blogs, due to their specialist knowledge, are well placed to do this. For example most blawgs are united in condemning the gradual dismantling over time by government of our once proud legal aid scheme. In my own area we have all been highly critical of the tenancy deposit legislation. Other niche blogs will do the same for topics in their area of expertise.

Supporting a law firm or promoting the writer

One reason why many of us blog is to support our business, and there is nothing wrong with this. But does it work?

Brian Inkster asked this question on the Time Blawg – do clients search online for a solicitor?  The answer seemed to be probably yes. My experience has been very much “yes” and Paul Hajek has also had a big success with his property blogs. It would be great if some legal bloggers could leave a comment below about the effect their blog has had on their practice.

Writing for the love of it

I suspect that this applies to most blogs, certainly the ones that last. I first started blogging because I wanted to write and express myself. It takes a lot of effort to maintain a blog – it should be something you enjoy doing – otherwise why do it?

Many of the blogs discussed above deal with things which interest the writer, and are perhaps written more for themselves or other lawyers than for clients. For example Jon Bloor’s Penninsulawyer and Brian Inkster’s Time Blawg. And indeed the blog you are on right now (or should be, unless this post has been scraped), my Solicitors Onlne blog, which I set up when I decided to limit my Landlord Law blog to landlord and tenant topics only.

We’re all publishers now

One of the wonderful things about this new interconnected world we live in, is that we can all be publishers now. Gone are the days of having to kow tow to ‘them upstairs’ for a book contract or a column in the paper. All it takes is a bit fiddling around on blogger or one of the other free providers and Bobs your uncle!

So are blogs set to grow into the future? You bet they are! As we have seen, there are masses of thriving and interesting law blogs out there covering a huge and diverse spectrum of legal topics. Their authors do not look like stopping any time soon.

But what do YOU think?  You’ll find a comment box just below…

Charles Dickens blogging photo by Mike Licht

The Headway blog theme

For some time, the design of this blog has been rather boring, essentially just dark blue and white. It was running the fabulous Headway theme but only version one.

The reason for this is that I had had problems upgrading.  Indeed I had tried to upgrade one day only to have the ‘visual editor’ (which is the way you change things on the new Headways) die on me.  Leaving me no option but to go back to version one and re-do everything.  The original version 1 does not have the visual editor which is why I was forced to stay with it.

However a friend told me that the most recent version is pretty stable with most of the problems ironed out, so I thought I would give it another go.  It worked a treat.

One of the things I really wanted to do with this blog was to put a dark blue background between the main posts area and the sidebar.  This can only be done (if using Headway) via the visual editor.

That done, I had great fun trying out all the different combination’s of colours and style options.  Some of them looked pretty weird.  However I liked having the title in a paler blue band right across the screen, and then somehow putting the home and about links up the top seemed to work.

There were a few problems to resolve however.  My thumbnail for excerpts plugin did not work any more, and my excerpts were thumbnailless. Horrors! However a quick hop over to the Headway forum brought forth the information that WP 3 has the facility to put thumbnails in the excepts now itself.

An examination of the post edit page did indeed reveal a new thumbnail item at the bottom left.  However I then had to go through the whole of the blog allocating thumbnails, which was a bit of a pain.  But done now.

Then there were the next post / previous post links.  I had put these in manually, into the single post editor page, but this page was now gone!  However again the HW forum reminded me of the Headway easy hooks feature which allows you to put things into tricky places on the blog.

A bit of messing around plus a change of the code I had been using, and, bingo! The thing was done.  I think it is important to be able to move from one post to the next on a blog.

So there you are.  A new design.  It should do me for a while anyway.  What do you think of it?

Sole practitioner collaboration

Last year I joined a group of sole practitioners, called the Independent Law Network.  They have been meeting up together for a couple of years now.  I was invited by Mark Foley (perhaps the nearest thing the group has to a leader), and they were very welcoming.

They are a lovely group of people and it was so nice to be able to talk to other sole practitioners about some of the problems that we all experience. No-one really understands what a sole practitioner has to cope with, like another sole practitioner.

Social media for soles

However I think I was a bit of a shock to them.  I bounded in, and started talking about blogs, twitter, Linkedin and all these strange social media things they had largely been able to ignore up to then.  Needless to say I proposed a group blog, which rather sportingly they agreed to try.  It is now online, the Independent Law Network blog, and we are starting to promote it.

The group also do a printed newsletter which we all send out to our clients as a way of cross referring our services.  The blog uses the same design, so the two are both recognisable as  an ILN production.

Building a blog

It has been fun making a blog for a group of bloggers. We all have our own page with a contact form (I used Contact form 7), and have a category in our name so I can do a link to each persons blogs from their page.

Photos have been a bit of a problem, some of us already had nice professional pictures, others have had to get family and friends to take them. We are considering a group booking at a professional photographers.

Anyway the blog is now out in the public domain.  It will be interesting to see how it progresses.  Whether the group will want to continue writing for it after a few months. Whether it will bring in any extra work.  Or whether anything else will come of it.  You never can tell what will happen on the internet.

Is group blogging the way forward for soles?

However I suspect that this sort of thing is going to be essential for sole practitioners, especially those who have a more traditional practice.  The public often prefer the more personal approach which a small firm can provide, but it is often difficult to find them.  This sort of initiative will help make sole practitioners more visible.

Do you do any networking with local colleagues?  Does anyone else do a collaborative blog with other professionals?  Do you have any suggestions, comments?

To get exposure for your blog, it is really important nowadays to promote it via social media.  One of the best ways of doing this is to get other people to promote it for you!  You do this by giving them handy little buttons and links.  My theme, the Headway theme provides social media buttons to go in the sidebar, but it is also nice to have some links for people to click when they finish reading your post.

When my web designer did my Landlord Law Blog for me, she sourced the add to any button which has links to practically every social media site you could possibly think of.  However after a while I started to get annoyed at the way it kept popping up and getting in my way when I was using the site.  Then I read about Nicholas Cardot’s plugin – Nicholas writes a very good blog called Site Sketch 101 and you can read about his plugin here.

I did try his plugin for a while, but it did not suit the style of my sites, so I decided to go looking for a few more.  One recommended by a Site Sketch 101 reader was the sexybookmarks plugin, and I am using this (at the time of writing) for my Landlord Law Blog.

However there are others.  One that I quite like is I love social bookmarking, and this is the one I am using here  (at the time of writing this – I may change it later).  The social media buttons appear if you hover hour mouse over the text at the end of the post.  You can customise how they appear and the buttons that show.

So far as twitter is concerned (very important for promoting blog posts), many sites have the little green tweetmeme buttons at the top of their posts.  I had this too for a while.  However after reading the Site Sketch  15 best wordpress plugins post I decided to start using backtype tweetcount.  This has two advantages (1) readers do not have to authorise the program to access their twitter account and (2) you can change the colour of the box to match your site style.  I have made it orange on the Landlord Law blog and the ‘house blue’ colour here.

Have you used any of these?  Which do you prefer?  Can you click one of them please before you go on your way!!

I love favicons.  They are those tiny little icons that sit in the address bar next to the website url/web address.  I think they look really cool, and differentiate (for me) sites where attention is paid to detail from all the others.

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!

I spent much of last year studying and reading about social media and how it works. This year it is time to put some of this into practice.

I have therefore started an experimental new service for lodger landlords. My existing service, Landlord Law,  does cater for people renting a room to a lodger, but lodger landlords and regular landlords do not really have the same needs, and a specialist site will be better (and more affordable) for the lodger landlords.

The new site, www.logerlandlord.co.uk, (a wordpress site) was launched yesterday  by a blog post on my Landlord Law Blog, and I will be running a twitter campaign for the next month, using #lodgerlandlord.

On 1 February I will start a 21 day blog series, simultaneously in the Landlord Law Blog and on Lodger Landlord – Tessa’s 21 tips for Lodger Landlords – effectively giving away the ‘crown jewels’.  Hopefully this will encourage lodger landlords to comment and tell me what they need by way of legal services.  The Lodger Landlord site will then provide those services.

I have spent much of the Christmas and New Year period working on this.  The site design is powered by the wonderful Headway Theme (I have finally got version 1.56 and the visual editor to work, which is fabulous).  My web designer has come up with two stonking designs for the 21 tips logo and the site header.  Other than that the site has been created by me.

As regards the design, some time ago my web designer Gill gave me the numbers for five colours, which are the colours used in the Landlord Law site, and which I have subsequently used for this site.  This Lodger Landlord web site uses the same colours in a different way, plus a new paler blue, which is the colour used for the ‘wrapper’ – the bit between the sidebar, the header and the post areas and also the non active navigation areas, which are white in my other Headway blogs.  I had great fun working it all out.

The other expense (apart from Gill’s fee) is a subscription to Aweber mailing service.  Lodger Landlords are being encouraged to sign up to a new mailing list.  I use Constant Contact for my Landlord Law mailing list, but as I want to keep this service completely separate, I decided that Aweber (highly recommended by high profile bloggers such as Problogger) would be better.  You will see a banner for them in the side bar.  I have had three sign up for the new mailing list so far, which is not bad as the site was only launched yesterday afternoon.

It has been a lot of work but enjoyable work.  I have done most of it on my wonderful macbook in the sitting room, with my son (playing computer games on his laptop) and husband (reading Arthur Conan Doyle).  I am currently up to day 17 on the 21 tips and have done about 1/2 of the twitter posts.  The twitter tips are being scheduled in my twitter client program Hootsuite.

By the way, the XX days of tips idea is not wholly original.  I am following in the footsteps of Problogger and Blog for Profit who had similar campaigns.  I think I am the first person to use the technique for a law related service however.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update – June 2011

Over a year later (June 2011), the Lodger Landlord site is still going strong. In fact bearing in mind that I did no posts at all between August 2010 and June 2011 it has done really well.

Unique visitors (at this time) average out at about 100 per day and most of the work I do on this site now is answering their question in the comments.

However it has also bought in some real money – the lodger agreement has been a steady if slow seller, and there have been a scattering of advice instructions. The site has more than covered its costs and has made me a small amount of money.

The documents and other products are now being sold via my new Your Law Store site, and we have plans to develop this further.  When I do, I will be in quite a good place as the site is well dug into the search engines now and is easily found by someone doing a search on lodger.

I’ve found another great plugin, although its got a bit of a silly name, and a soppy heart logo.  Its called ‘comment luv’ (I said it was silly), and what it does is give a link back to the most recent post on your blog commentators blogs.  I learned about it from the Blogussion site here.

“Why should I do that?”, Old School Lawyer might say. “If someone comes to my blog I want to keep them there, not send them off looking at someone else’s blog”

Well, there are a number of reasons:

• People are more likley to comment if they are going to get a plug for their own blog, and blogs with lots of comments are more interesting
• Its nice to find out a bit more about the people who are reading your blog
• If you use the comment luv plugin, you can register your blog on the comment luv web site, which may get you more visitors
• It is a nice ‘thank you’ thing to do
• He that giveth (so the social media theory goes) shall receiveth

Well thats the idea anyway.  But as someone who is interested in what other people are saying, I think its great to get a link back to their blog.

What do you think?

You can read more about the comment luv plugin here,  or if you have a WordPress blog, do a new plugin search on comment luv.

Using the internet seems a bit like magic.  You click on your computer and the fruits of knowledge of the whole world are at your fingertips.  Just like that.

And now we are told that we do not even have to store information on our own machines – we can store it all ‘in the cloud’.  One pictures a sort of golden cloud floating benevolently above the earth, radiating knowledge and wisdom to the multitide.

But its not really like that of course.  All information on the internet has to be stored somewhere, and it is not in the sky, but in a server, down here on earth, rows and rows of servers in cabinets, using up masses and masses of electricity.

So if you wish to be green (as I hope all readers do) you should try to find a company which either uses green energy, or which at least does its best to offset the carbon used, to host your web-site.

This is what I decided to do when I made the decision not to host my blog at my usual ISP, largely due, I have to say, to the rather large hosting fee he quoted.  ”No”, I thoght, “I’ll see if I can find something cheaper and greener.”

I  decided however that an essential requirement of my new ISP, as well as green values, was that the servers on which my blog was to be hosted, would be in England (where I live).  This though, I found, very much limited my options.  Most of the companies, even English ones, offering a green hosting service, turned out to have their servers in Amercia, normally in California, where the sunshine is.

In the end, it came down to two:

The first was Ecohost at http://www.ecohost.coop/. This is run by a co-operative in Manchester. Their servers are stored in a bunker in Lincolnshire, and they say they are the only UK data centre 100% powered by renewable energy.

The second was Ecowebhosting at www.ecowebhosting.co.uk. This company is located in Cambridge and their servers are in Nottinghamshire. They don’t at present use green electricity, but practice carbon offsetting by planting trees.

I did also come across another site named ‘eco servers‘, but this turned out to be part of a company called UK Fast, which I suspect is very very good, but which is also very very expensive, so this put it out of the reckoning for hosting a couple of blogs.

In the end I decided to go with Ecowebhosting, and this is where this blog is hosted now.  Ecowebhosting, although not the ‘pure’ solution, make a big effort to be green (and as apparently their trees more than compensate for the carbon from their servers, it is a pretty good effort).  And they have a fantastic website through which their service is run.  They also provide a lot of other facilities, including the ability to install WordPress easily and quickly.    And they are amazingly cheap.

In fact it was a bit of a revelation to me.  For £20 per month, I can host unlimited web-sites, using up unlimited space and bandwidth.  I can also set up as many email addresses as I want.  Plus their domain names are cheaper than I have seen elsewhere.  As well as this, Rob Percival, who runs the service, has been incredibly helpful and supportive.  Which means that I, a solicitor with no proper web training, have been able to set up and develop several web-sites and blogs extremely easily and cheaply.  And buy domain names and set up personal email accounts for my son and my Mother!  Not bad.

So as a result of this exercise I feel far more in control.  I know where my site is hosted and I know that the owner is concerned for the environment and is seeking to offset the carbon used (and persuade the data centre he uses to use green electricity, which he says may come soon).  Due to the superb facilities provided by the company and the easy (well mostly) to use web-site, I am able to host my own sites,  and others for colleagues and family.

Although the three sites listed above are the ones that I found, there may well be others.  I hope this post will inspire you too, to find and use a green internet host.

Do you use a green hosting company?  If so, do the servers live in your own country or elsewhere, and if elsewhere, do you mind this?

When I wrote my earlier post here, I said I had been doing a lot of research.  In this post I set out some of the sites that I have been using.

Probably the best blogging site is Problogger which is  written by Australian blogger Darren Rowse.  He is a full time professional blogger who apparently makes a very good living from it.  If anyone is contemplating starting a new blog, I highly recommend an evening reading the Problogger site.

He has also written two books.  One is an e-book called 31 days to build a better blog, and is excellent.  I bought it some time ago, and often read it when I am stuck for ideas, as it gives me inspiration.  Although it is an electronic rather than a ‘real’ book, this is actually really useful, because it makes it so much easier to follow the many links out.

The other book is called ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income, and is also very good although not, for me, as useful as the 31 days book. But if you are thinking of blogging professionally, worth a read.

Finally Problogger has now started a blogging forum, which I joined when it was very cheap (I think the price has gone up substantially since).  It also is very helpful, as you can ask questions if you are stuck about something.

The next person whose blog has helped me is Grant Griffiths, a former American Attorney who blogs as Blog for Profit. His son, Clay, wrote the Headway theme which is used for this blog, and his blog has also been a bit of an inspiration to me. Perhaps in some ways more so than Problogger, as he understands lawyers. He has now given up the law and runs a business designing blogs, mainly I think for lawyers.

In October 2009  he ran a series, called 31 days to Kick your Blog in the Butt (not a title, I am sure, that would have ever been chosen by an British solicitor, but there you go, its another country over there), which was also extremely helpful, particularly as at that time my web designer and I were building my new Landlord Law Blog. After his 31 days, Grant too turned his series into an e-book, which is also highly recommended, and you can buy it from his web-site, along with a work book and helpful book on twitter.  Although actually you can also read the blog series here.

Those are the main two sites that I have used.  However there are several other sites which I have found very helpful.  Blogussion, which appears to be run by a  bunch of school boys and college students, is a brilliant site and just shows that we old ‘uns can learn a lot from the modern yoof.    Copyblogger has some great posts on writing, although recently I have been finding some of them a bit irritating.  Lawyerist is another blog about legal blogs, interesting but not as good as Blog for Profit.  Remarkable Communication is a helpful blog on marketing, particularly online marketing, and if we are talking about marketing, we also ought to mention Seth Godins blog, considered by many to be the master of marketing, and whose blog is good for ideas.

You will probably have noticed that none of these blogs are British.  I haven’t really found anything similar here, mainly I suppose because we have not taken up blogging to the same extent as in other countries, or have not been doing it for as long (I set up my Landlord Law blog in February 2006 and I was one of the first legal bloggers here, Problogger (an Australian)  however started way  back in 2002).

What do you think of these sites?  Had you come across them before?  Have you found any sites you would like to recommend?