Case Study: Consolidation of an existing corporate website and blog into a WordPress blog/website.

The M | Ventures website was designed completely in flash and was considered a very good site in 2003.  The site had two big problems, (1) it did not rank well in search engines (Google hates flash) and (2) it was very difficult to update.  A screenshot of the site can be found to the right. 

The general partner started blogging in 2005 with a blog titled Texas Venture Capital Blog.  He took to the blog format quickly and asked one of his IT guy to create a simple theme to replace his default Kubrick design.  The simple theme can be see to the left.  Notice that it included a simple header and Google ads.

Soon the general partner realized how easy it was to update his blog through the WordPress CMS and how well it ranked in Google and other search engines.  He asked this simple question: "Why can’t my blog and website be one in the same, housed entirely in a WordPress site?"  The answer was simple, "There is none." 

Weblogs Work took the assignment of consolidating the two.  First our designer worked with the general partner to come up with a new look and feel.  The concept was to create something with a Texas feel - perhaps cows, spurs, horses and cowboys.  The designer took these ideas and came up with a very subtle ‘Texas’ design that can be seen below.  The Google ads were removed.  And the interior pages were kept very basic.  The new site is a work in progress, but each aspect can easily be edited by the general partner without assistance from anyone else.  Visitor statistics are built right in and he is generating dealflow from the site today (something his old site NEVER did).  

In part four of a new series of interviews with lawyers who are using blogs we talked to Robert Williamson of the Construction Owners and Builders Law Blog. 

Q: Why did you start a blog?

A: Staying on top of new developments in construction law is one of my strengths as an attorney. The blog gives me a way to pass those developments on to others who might be interested and to archive them for my own use later. In addition, I enjoy writing.

Q: Have you generated additional legal business directly or indirectly related to your blog?

A: The blog is only two months old; its generated some compliments but no business so far.

Q: Have any of your peers seen your blog? Do they comment on it? Does the fact that they read it cause you to write differently?

A: I’ve received some nice compliments from peers. For their sake as well as my own, I try hard not to "come in light" when I make an observation or comment or express an opinion.

In part three of a series of interviews with lawyers who are using blogs we talked to Mark Hall of Babst, Calland, Clements, Zomnir of Pittsburgh. 

Q: When and why did you start a blog?

A:  I started blogging approximately a year ago.  After five years of working in the federal court, I had a great deal of specialized, “insider” knowledge about how the courts worked and I was trying to reestablish my complex, commercial litigation practice.  The idea was to provide a resource for litigants and lawyers practicing in the federal courts in western Pa.

Q: Have you generated additional legal business directly or indirectly related to your blog?

A: No direct business yet.  We’ve been written up in newspaper articles, though, and are maybe getting cudos for being innovative and cutting edge.

Q: Have any of your peers seen your blog? Do they comment on it? Does the fact that they read it cause you to write differently?

A: Yes, peers have seen it and commented.  I don’t write differently for them, but I do try to avoid commentary on the quality of particular judges.  

In the second installment in our series of interviews with lawyers who blog, we talked to Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage fame.

Q: When and why did you start a blog?

A: November, 2001. Christopher Locke made me do it. With that send to his EGR list he set off a whole flurry of blogging. Like most things Locke is prone to suggesting one do, it raised a few eyebrows, and prompted the occasional second thought — but has been lots of fun and a good idea in the long run.

Q: Have you generated additional legal business directly or indirectly related to your blog?

A: Both. Directly, the blog has resulted in many contacts from those needing legal assistance in my own area of expertise or in an area where colleagues at my firm are well suited to help. Indirectly, reading weblogs and participating in the conversations they engender keep me very well informed about current developments pertinent to my practice and the needs of the firm’s clients and potential clients.

Q: Have any of your peers seen your blog? Do they comment on it? Does the fact that they read it cause you to write differently?

A: A great many of them have; some are regular readers. Yes, they comment on it from time to time. No, I don’t think it causes me to write differently.

In part one of a new series of interviews with lawyers who are using blogs we talked to John A. Day from Branham & Day Lawyers in Brentwood, Tennessee.

Q: When and why did you start blogging?

A: We started our first blog, www.dayontorts.com , in late February 2005. We started the blog with a couple thoughts in mind. First, we wanted to share information with fellow lawyers about the law of personal injury and wrongful death in Tennessee. The plaintiff’s bar has a rich tradition of sharing information and I have attempted to follow that tradition during my 24 years of law practice. In the past, that effort has consisted of CLE speeches (over 150 of them), articles in legal publications (15-20), book chapters (2-3), a monthly newsletter of 10+ years duration (Tennessee Tort Law Letter) and a book (Tennessee Law of Comparative Fault). A blog seemed like the next logical step. Second, our business primarily comes from other lawyers, in Tennessee and elsewhere. We do not advertise on TV: we do not even have a Yellow Pages ad. We believe that by helping other lawyers see and resolve issues they confront in their day-to-day practice they will call upon us for assistance when confronted with cases beyond their experience or expertise or cases that will overwhelm their office, either because of the time required to work on those cases or the cost of adequately preparing them. Finally, advances in technology gave us the chance to share information more easily. The "DayonTorts" website was around for years, but it was difficult to update given the limitations of technology at the time. (Or, more precisely, my limitations using available technology.) Updating blogs is easy; I can do it when I am on the road or enjoying a weekend at the lake. I can also leave several draft posts for someone else to publish if I will not have access to an Internet connection.

Q: How you generated additional business directly or indirectly related to your blog?

A: They say that 50% of all marketing dollars are wasted; figure out which 50% are wasted and you can become rich. After less than 5 months of blogging it is difficult to say if we have generated any legal business from the blog. I will add that I find it difficult to say whether my book, newsletter, articles or speeches have resulted in any business - referrals from lawyers don’t necessary work that way. I believe, but cannot prove, that the blog will help our practice by continuing to reinforce our reputation as a law firm that stays current with the law and technology, is willing to share what it knows with fellow lawyers, and has the experience and expertise to handle complicated personal injury and wrongful death cases. In fact, we are so confident with the potential of blogging that we have rolled out three additional blogs in the past couple months. The first, www.tnbusinesslitigation.com , is directed toward general counsel and business lawyers. We have found an increasing number of companies want to hire experienced trial lawyers to handle business litigation; the nature of business litigation is such that many lawyers who do it exclusively lack extensive experience in trial. While we usually will not defend personal injury and wrongful death cases, we do represent individuals and companies is business disputes. The second is www.medmalblog.com. We have done medical negligence work for 24 years and decided that a specialized blog in that field would be a benefit to the Bar. Finally, we are getting ready to launch www.erisaontheweb.com. One of our lawyers has an extensive practice representing professionals and business people who have disability insurance claims. This blog is directed toward claimants and other lawyers who are representing claimants. This is a substantial undertaking. We have divided the work between 5 lawyers and our nurse.

Q: Have any of your peers seen your blog? Do they comment on it? Does the fact that they read it cause you to write differently?

A: Yes, many of our peers have seen our blog and in fact that is our target audience. We have received many positive comments from lawyers (and judges) and in fact a good number of lawyers have told me that they check the blog every day. We do write the blog differently because they read it - they are our target audience. We do get a significant number of comments from consumers so we know that they are reading, but we focus on lawyers. We believe (hope?) that any consumer who reads our site will understand that while our target is other lawyers we represent people and will accept representation directly from a consumer if they choose to call us.

I am happy to note that we will be at the Blogging Enterprise Conference in Austin (we will be bringing a few of our clients).  The Blogging Enterprise is a one-day conference that will explore blogging, podcasting and video podcasting and their potential benefits and value in building brands, educating prospects, making sales and cultivating customer loyalty.

Brian was invited, but I had to find out about it from Micro Persuasion (Steve Rubel is going to be the keynote speaker).  Anyway, it is exciting that this sort of conference is going on here in our backyard.  Paul Walker and Steve Farrer are producing the event.  It will be fun to be back on campus more than a decade after college (most of us are longhorns). 

This afternoon I had an interesting call from a long time blogger who had installed WordPress on a server in his office more than a year ago.  He moved his data from an online blogging service and enjoyed the control he had with his own server.  This morning his server crashed and he lost everything - almost three years of daily posts that he will never be able to get back.  He thought that his tape backup system was running, but for some reason it did not capture the MySQL data. 

We talked about what we do at Weblogs Work and I explained that we are not really a ‘blog hosting service’ instead we are more of a new media PR and marketing firm.  I did share with him the design and architecture of our blog hosting platform.  How does everyone else safeguard their blogs?  Check out the WordPress Codex.  Here is how we do it:

For most of our clients a shared WordPress environment is appropriate and we locate their blog on the Shared Blog Server.  The Shared Blog Server serves up the blog on the internet and two other servers run the PHP databases that power WordPress.  Each night the server executes an automatic data dump of the text in the blog.  That data is replicated on the Blog Backup Server and that server is replicated on the RoboCopy Backup Cluster on a separate network.  Each week the server executes a complete backup of all data, html and css and that data is replicated on the Blog Backup Server and that server is replicated on the RoboCopy Backup Cluster.  For larger, more popular blogs we dedicate a server for the blog.  In certain cases we have load balancers that can allow multiple servers to seem like a single blog to viewers.  Any comments?

Saturday afternoon I was talking to my father about replacing his consulting firm’s website with a blog.  I wrote about it in my blog here.  I referenced a blog post from 2004, but I read Paul Kedrosky’s post from today and he basically makes the case that blogs are a "disruptive content management system innovation."  He reposted an article from Cathleen Moore that I will reblog here as well:

Blog tools tackle content management
Six Apart, NetWin introduce enterprise blogging features

By  Cathleen Moore
August 26, 2005

Deploying a full-blown ECM (enterprise content management) system to address basic corporate content publishing and workflow needs has been likened to trying to kill a fly with a rocket launcher. A more suitable solution may lie in souped-up blogging tools, which by design simplify content publishing.

Speaking at the Blog Business Summit earlier this month, DL Byron, principal at TexturaDesign, a blog design and consulting company, said blogging tools are very effective ECM systems in certain environments.

"What is happening on corporate sites is companies are looking at blogging tools as an alternative to [Microsoft's (Profile, Products, Articles)] SharePoint, especially when they combine a blog engine with a wiki," Byron said.

New business blog tools include Version 3.2 of Six Apart’s Movable Type, rolled out earlier this week, and SurgeBlog 1.0, an enterprise-class blog server being released next week by newcomer NetWin.

Dad is on board and will be moving his site to a WordPress based site, Architel is moving their blog from MT and their website to WordPress (Dan is doing the redesign), and my blog and website will be redesigned and moved to WordPress too. 

Mike Rundle, over at Business Logs, calls us on the carpet for using a standard template as a placeholder while we ready our main site. He’s right in that and his other comments. We jumped immediately into the conversation as we put together our Weblogs Work service offering, and you’ll see an entirely new look, new lingo and the real approach we’re using for our clients next week.

We’re stoked. Dan Cederholm, of SimpleBits, did the site design, and we think it’s pretty snazzy. Maybe Mike will come on back and have a looksee.

What could be easier that turning on a blog for your company?  Download some open source code like Word Press, install it on a server in your corporate data center, create a nice template, and start blogging.  Turns out it can be hard.

First, the most popular blog software solution is open source.  You have to know a little bit about linux and programming to get it setup.  Second, since the software is open source when there is an issue you are often on your own.  For example, yesterday Secunia issued a security advisory for Word Press indicating that they found a ‘highly critical’ security flaw in the software.  The flaw is as of yet ‘unpatched’ - i.e. no one has issued a patch to resolve the issue.  How can you protect your investment?  You better have someone on staff who can help or hire someone to ‘manage your blog’. 

Companies often spend thousands of dollars per month paying for Yellow Page ads.  These ads are unmanaged and stay the same throughout the year.  Managed weblogs typically cost less than $1,000 per month and by their very nature are dynamic and ever changing.  Why pay more for a static ad?  Did you know more people visit Google than the Yellow Pages when hiring a lawyer?  Managed weblogs work.

Update:   New version of WordPress out now, addressing the security issue mentioned. 

Wired has a story today about the super resourceful FedExFurniture project. We helped Jose set up the blog for his site, so we’re glad to see the story have, er, legs. (Did he build legs for the FedExFurniture?).

RED Magazine and the Dallas Opera held their 6-Month Anniversary (I know anniversaries happen once per year) Party and concert at the Gypsy Tea Room this evening. They celebrated the release of RED’s “Music Movement” issue - featuring all the high notes around the Dallas music and entertainment scene.  I heard a rumor that weblogs are going to start working for RED.