Minor Updates in the Future

I want to give you a quick update on what is coming and what to expect over the next couple of days.

First, thank you to all that has contributed to this blog thus far. It has been a huge success and I intend to put a little more effort in getting your articles up on a more timely basis! I have been swamped over the past few weeks with vacation and catching up on my real work. I have found over the last 11 months that there are actually people out on the internet that find our (your) work helpful or at least that is what they say. As Pacino said in Scent of a Woman, Whoo AAAA. I love that movie.

As some of you know I am as technical savvy as my 3 year old daughter. I have little understanding of how this works and why so many people hit this site. I have been trying to figure out how to make this into more than just a blog and with some help from you we have been somewhat successful or somewhat not. A few complaints / recommendations over the past several months are as followed:

• There is no place for profiles or top contributors
• Somewhat hard to navigate
• Want more interaction
• Easier way to submit articles without emailing them
• Open up more topics
• Do a Question and Answer section on the blog
• Create more of a research tool and less of a marketing tool
• Accept articles that are not so spammy
• Create a better looking site

There were others that landed on my to-do list and I will get around to them later. I first appreciate the feedback and will do a better job trying to respond quicker. Let me comment on all of these items.

There is no place for profiles or top contributors – WordPress (the blogging service I use) tries to keep SEO tactics to a minimum and why I know that you probably want certain posts linking back to you for credit, I am going to take a pass on this for now. As you already know you can link to your posts but I think if we started opening up profiles they may consider it spam and that is not what we are all about here. I don’t even get paid for this thing. If you want a link that bad I posted a few months ago about putting certain contributors in my blogroll just as long as the sites were relevant and you are an attorney.

Somewhat hard to navigate – What can I say, you are right. I have tried countless amounts of time to change the code on this thing (I have no clue what I’m doing) but it doesn’t allow for it since its a free service. There are certain things you can do and not do on this service and that is one thing I can’t do. So my quick fix is the following. I plan to make the front page (default page) into a portal page with links out to your information. This will make it much easier to navigate. I’m still working on how to set it up because it will require some tweaking but its doable. Check back in the next few days for the change. However, if it doesn’t look right I’m changing the default setting back.

Want more Interaction – Interaction for what? I’m assuming you mean interaction with people that have questions regarding certain blog posts? If you want me to open up your posts for comments let me know. I tried to keep them close for several reasons, one being I don’t have time to answer questions, and I’m not the one that should be answering these questions. The posts that I do on this blog I keep open for comments, but the articles are up to you. It would also require to track your posts so that if someone comments or has a question, you can answer them.

Easier Way to Submit Articles – I’m working on it. The only problem is putting the code into a page. I will keep on trying so check back. I am also investigating the user options on this thing and may just start passing out a username password so you can publish these posts yourself. It does give me an option to assign contributors and this would really help me out to boot.

Open up more Topics – Suggest them and if they make sense I will open them up. I have about all that I could find and many are still sitting blank, so if you have suggestions, I’m all ears.

Q & A on this Blog – I tested it and got bombarded with emails. Its just too much to handle. I went out and found a site, which I think was recommended by someone here. I would love to have some sort of Q & A on this site but if it requires me to post every single question its not going to happen. On a given week I get around 10 – 15 questions and I don’t even promote Q & A. Could you imagine the time it would take me if I did! So my recommendation would be to use the site that I recommended at least for now. Again though, if it can be done without having to monitor it every single second tell me how to do it and I will consider it. In the meantime jump over to that other site.

Create more of a research tool and less of a marketing tool – I’m not in the research nor marketing business. This comment mainly came from visitors i.e. dissatisfied visitors I guess. That is just out of my scope. I also never considered this a marketing tool. I feel like this is a blog of legal information and nothing more. I guess if you consider the links going to the contributors a marketing tool than I suppose you may be right. For now I don’t have the time to gather all the laws on each state nor barely write this post. If someone would like to create a small research tool, send me the content and I will post it in a research category.

Accept articles that are not so spammy – If you guys think these are spammy you should see what I don’t publish! I have done a better job in looking over all the submissions. I also have a guy that is gathering other articles and sends them over to me. As a team effort, I would call it a success thus far. My suggestion would be to tell me which articles look really spammy and I will remove them if I agree. I personally know about 90-95% of these posts are good posts with a ton of helpful information. Tell me what the other 5-10% and I will look at them.

Create a Better looking Site – I recently changed out the template and I think this looks much better! I love the look and got some decent feedback from many of you. I made the change about 3 days ago.

For the most part all positive feedback accept from a few, although I did enjoy the emails from all. I will begin making changes asap. I am also looking for other cool and exciting sites that are geared towards the legal community so I can make people aware of their options when looking for legal information. If anyone has recommendations continue to send them. Also, let me know how you feel about this template.