Be Excellent To Each Other

I've been lawyering in various guises for over ten years now. I've probably mentioned it briefly before but I've been doing personal injury for most of my career. Yeah, yeah, chasing ambulances and the like but, y'know what, I'd much rather work for someone who is normal Joe with a 'proper job' than doing, say, commercial lease work (which I've also done) for big business. It's hard to relate to the next Domino franchise being erected in some rough part of town probably paying for hoodies to stand on a roundabout in the rain with the latest deal on stuff crust pizza than it is to work for, say, some guy who was minding his own business when some dumbass dropped a 80 tonne barrel on him. I worked for the latter and saw him at his lowest about a month after the accident - he was angry at the lack of interest from his employer and got increasingly more angry when no one visited him at home after several month. Then I saw him sink lower when he contracted DVT. Then I saw the fear in his eyes when he told me they were going to amputate his leg below the knee. I worked bloody hard for him.

In fact, I've worked hard for all my client's over the years and probably helped a few lives along the way. I've also probably helped some people have nice holidays or buy the latest console or put a deposit down for a new car. Or maybe helped someone pay off an overdraft they were struggling with. Who knows. For the most part it's honest work. The compensation culture is a load of old bollocks. Shit claims go nowhere or never get taken on. Liars and bullshitters get found out. Insurance companies aren't stupid and neither are solicitors.

Anyway, I'm getting off track. The wages are shit because PI gets a bad reputation despite all the hard work people like me do. But what grinds my gears are the people I've worked for:

Without exception they're useless. We've all seen the Valve employee handbook now but when I think of the places I've worked I'm vastly unsuprised that there was a huge turnover. Where I'm at at the moment is the worst I've been though. Reading your emails, management by email, threatening emails to staff, lack of direction etc. Everyone is demotivated and angry. Lawyers who have been working for far longer than myself have been bullied into a factory style of work.

So I want to go it alone. I want to create a Valve for PI lawyers. It'd start off with just me, obviously, working my ass off but then I'd get some of the best people I've worked with to come and join me when I'm on my feet.

But I need a work source.

This is the big problem really. I need some way of drawing people in to talk to me about what they've been through. I've got ideas but I'm thinking a static website but with regular updates about stuff that's happening in the world.

I need to get it up and running so I can have a test run and see if I get any traffic. And perhaps some way of getting the site out into the public domain, to the top of Google or whatever.

I've no budget whatsoever. I'm not "buying" work in like the big firms are doing. I want people to come to me, have a fantastic service no matter what happens with their claims - win or lose - and pass on my details and try and generate work without selling my soul to the devil.

So I hope that's explained the mission statement and what I'm aiming to do.

So that's where the website comes in. I've picked a name now on http://www.123-reg.co.uk but I don't know what to do next.

Here's the options:

Add SSL: Apparently this protects information. From whom I don't know. You lot, perhaps.
Add Instantsite: comes with 1 webpage or 10 or 50. Apparently it comes with £50 worth of Google Adwords whatever they might be.
Add email: Gives you an email with your domain name. I like the sound of that but it comes with personal or professional? Presumably I'll just want personal first but is professional any better?
Add VPS: I don't really have the cash for this trial venture.
Add webhosting: I definately need this right? Presumably I'll just need a starter kit of 1GB.
Add websitebuilder: Apparently I can build a website without code but it also says: "5 pages, basic templates, 3 emails
2GB webspace, 1TB data limit, 1 free domain" Now, I'm confused what all this means. Is this instead of buying the piecemeal bits above or something else?
Add instant traffic: Again this looks a little expensive for this trial, but is it worth it? Guarenteed google inclusion apparently and included on 100-400 search engines. Erm, don't people just use Google.

Anyway, before I even get onto the web-o build-o, I've got to navigate the above, so any advice would be super helpful and appreciated. Mocking, probably less so.

I'm pretty sure you only really need to concern yourself with SSL if you're offering some sort of merchant service on your site. Taking card details and the like. Unless you're storing client information on the server or something, which I doubt you would be!

I doubt you'd really need VPS (assuming they're referring to a virtual private server) - at least not at this stage. As for email, that's always a good one to have - provided you keep the domain name paid for every time it comes time to renew, else your email address becomes useless!

I'd ignore their "website builder" if you're using Wordpress or whatever. Chances are, their templates are gash. Wordpress and its ilk have thousands of templates available for nowt.

As I mentioned in Bits and Bobs, ignore all of that "included in search engines" bullshit. You can submit your own site to Google - not that you need to because any good search engine will "find" your site automatically eventually if you link to it from somewhere Google already knows about. Same goes for the other search engines.

No idea what that Instantsite thing is, but £50 of Google Adwords vouchers might come in handy. That basically means you've got £50 to spend advertising your site on Google's search engine results pages (and elsewhere people are running Google Ads if you wish). You know when you search for something on Google, say "personal injury" and "sponsored links" appear? Those are Google Adwords.

If you're looking to get things off the ground, I'd recommend dropping £50 on Adwords as a matter of course. If you get really specific with your Adwords, say, "personal injury [your town name]", chances are you might only be paying a few pence per click, so £50 would go a long way. It might be better to ignore their "site builder" option and just pay for Adwords yourself, though, dependent on how much their "site builder" guff actually costs - might be false economy.

I've also found that Google like to dish out £25, £50 and £75 Adwords vouchers like candy if you've ever used the service in the past anyway. I get them on my doormat every few months.



Absolutely no idea about this bit! Best off waiting for someone who has used 123reg before to answer that. However, 2GB and 1TB of bandwidth should be perfectly suitable for your needs assuming it's just going to be a fairly simple website with information and contact details on it.

Okay, forget all the the tech stuff for now.
What do you want the website to do?

And this!

(Also, if you're offering training contracts, I'll gladly sort it all out for you. )

Ok, that makes it clearer. Thanks. So I'll just go for webhosting and personal email.

I do need some kind of thing on the site where people insert there contact details and ask me to contact them to discuss what's happens. Perhaps the site sends me an email when that happens but otherwise I won't be keeping any info on the site.

Oh yeah that'll be fine. Just a simple email form. You can get plenty of Wordpress plugins that will make that job even easier!

Hmm, WordPress would do that but you're probably better off with a different CMS (content management system) like Drupal, but that can be more complicated.
Are you determined to do it yourself?

Indeed. As I say, there are loads of CMS options out there - I just find Wordpress incredibly easy to use if you're an absolute beginner, and it doesn't just create "blogs"!

So it's largely static with links to pages on the site where I tediously explain various types of stuff I do.

There's a box for people to insert contact details and ask for a call back.

I'll add a twitter feed for updates on law stuff, y'know, to keep it adding material.

I'm thinking a video or two explaining stuff also. People like videos yah?

Otherwise I'll keep it simple.

Does that sound to complex for a techno moron?

Absolutely. I've no budget whatsoever unless dreams become currency anytime soon.

Not at all. It's really really simple. These CMS solutions come with a variety of theme options. Install the CMS software, pick a theme you like, tweak it a bit (a case, usually, of changing colours, changing image files and installing "plugins"). Once that's done, adding content to the site - be it video, text, whatever - is as simple as posting a reply on this forum.

The most complicated thing will be getting WordPress onto your space to begin with.

The tech stuff you'll need is PHP support and a database (which will almost certainly be MySQL).

I think Wordpress and a decent theme would do the job nicely. Some of the templates make the site look less like a blog and enable you to knock up a site pretty quickly. Like WTB says, there's bound to be some decent Contact Form plugins too.

I thought Trooper (I might be wrong, sorry whoever it was) suggested that 123reg.co.uk came with WordPress pre-installed?

A lot of these webhosting solutions come with the old "one-click install" nowadays, though. Press a button and Wordpress (or any number of other CMSes) is installed on your server automagically.

Obviously what Grim... says is right, though. Make sure you get a MySQL database in your hosting package else you'll be able to very little with your web space. Presumably that'll be a given though if you're using a hosting package that advertises the aforementioned "one-click install" stuff.

That's why I like hosting that comes with Softaculous or Fantastico etc. Few clicks.. Wordpress installed.

So did I, but you didn't mention that in your big list.
Let me get in front of a real PC and take a look.

http://www.123-reg.co.uk/web-hosting/#info

"Applications" is what they are calling it. Even the basic package allows one "application", be it WordPress, phpBB, Drupal, etc.

I'd be very surprised if they aren't "one-click install" if they're calling them "applications".

edit: It actually says "install popular applications with a single mouse click" in the description.

Party on then, that's what you want.

Hey, I'm new to this. Don't poke fun!

EDIT: I appreciate the help guys. I really do. You can come and take the piss when it's all up and running. Erm, how long would that take d'yareckon?

I'll buy this shit tomorrow and get going. Couldn't be happier!

I ain't!

But yeah, it all seems in order - pull the trigger!

If you do decide to go with WordPress, I'm happy to answer any questions, by the way. I don't know much about the other popular open source CMS software other than a few brief dabbles.

It's perhaps a way off, but it really is worth spending a few quid on a premium Wordpress theme.

I suggested this:
http://www.weebly.com/
as it is totally free and very easy to use.

I created this:
http://www.bidwriterservices.co.uk/
for my impending mo-in-law in literally 10 minutes.

My sister, who is a complete techy noob, has recently made a website using http://www.moonfruit.com/.

Now, also not knowing much about making websites, this might be rubbish and if so, please ignore it (unless you want some party* bags).

While it is a tiny bit slow to load, I am quite impressed with her website, http://www.iompartybags.co.uk/

Again not knowing anything really about making websites, I do not know how easy it is to make them optimised for mobile phones, but this is automatically done for you.

*Perhaps suitable for say a child's themed 40th?

Yeah some of them are great, but be careful you're not paying for stuff you won't use! A lot of them have so much functionality and so many possible variations in how they can be used, that the WordPress back-end has been completely mangled and complicated.

For example, a "newspaper" style one we once bought at work was far beyond what we needed, and in order to get posts to show up in the right places, you had to remember to tag everything with particular tags and stuff, only upload images of particular dimensions, etc. It was quite annoying.

If Ian is making a fairly static site, it'd be best to avoid the more "full-featured" themes, is what I mean.

LOL

POTW.

I don't think I've ever clicked on a sponsored link; I always scroll down past them.

Does anyone on here go to the sponsored links first when, say, they are looking for a service or product?

It depends if they happen to throw up what I'm looking for or not.

But the most important thing to remember is - as someone with a number of years experience managing very large Adwords accounts - fucking loads of people do click them!

In peak season, we were spending upwards of £10,000 a day on Adwords. That's at an average of about 26 pence per click, so that's a lot of clicks. And by the way, that average includes bidding wars with multi-million pound travel companies at £1.50 per click, right down to 1p a click for more obscure search terms. You won't be paying anywhere near 26 pence per click if you do a bit of research and target a few specific niches/locales. *

Besides, you pay per click, so it doesn't really hurt you if people aren't clicking (although they definitely will). Worst case scenario, someone skims your ad and doesn't click it, but notices the name of your firm. Free advertising!

* If you're interested, and perhaps don't know what the hell I'm on about, really quickly: You create an advert for your site. "Personal Injury Solicitors - Visit Ian Fairies and Co today for your PI needs" or whatever.

Then you decide what search terms you're going to bid on. Say "personal injury London". You enter your maximum bid per click - say 20 pence. Then, at a maximum, you'll be paying 20 pence each time someone clicks on your ad. That's a maximum though. What you actually pay depends on your competition. If there's NOBODY else bidding on "personal injury London", you'll pay just 1 pence per click and your ad will appear at the top.

However if competition is fierce for "personal injury London" (which, by the way, I imagine it definitely is), and five companies are bidding higher than 20 pence per click, say 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70 pence per click, your ad will appear in sixth position on the Google results page behind those guys but above anyone paying less than 20 pence, and you'll probably wind up paying 1 pence more than whatever the bidder below you is paying. So if a seventh company is bidding 10 pence per click, you'll pay 11 pence. If you get me?

It's very exciting!

Some of our PPC phrases are up to £4 a click. We get quite a few clicks, but very few conversions as a result of Google Ads. I think a lot does depend on the industry you're in though.

Personally, I have Adblock installed, so I never see Google Ads anyway.

£4!? What industry (if you don't mind me asking)? You ought to sort out some sort of gentlemen's agreement with the competition!

Having said that, I'm sure "holidays" would've been similar in the travel industry had it not been for our great organic position and the fact that a certain travel company pretty much owns all of the websites that advertise on there...

Employment Law and Health & Safety. Average deals will be bigger than your average holiday, which is probably why the PPC stuff is higher. It seems pretty cut-throat industry too - some of the results you see for the phrases we use are for what look like smaller businesses owned by the bigger competitors.

Sometimes I'd like to get into PPC (we outsource it at the mo as we don't have time and they probably don't trust me) but then I snap out of it.

It's pretty boring, really! But it's also extremely low maintenance once it's set up. The outsourcing thing is a total con - the people "managing" your account just let it tick over and earn their commission. They only do anything if you ask them to do it. That's why I wound up managing ours in the end!

It's slightly different with us - they don't get commission, but are paid a flat monthly fee, so they have to be seen to be doing something. They tweak the phrases used, add/remove some and try variations and all that. Stuff that could be done in-house though, obviously.

Oh yeah I was being disingenuous using the phrase "commission". They used to get a kickback directly from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft based on how much we spent, but then the search engines stopped that and flat fees came in.





They really don't!

Seriously, though. In my experience at least, these guys weren't doing anything at all - despite claiming that they did. They'd occasionally titivate things I imagine, but on the whole our accounts were left to their own devices unless we specifically asked them to change something. They certainly weren't "actively managing" our accounts like we paid them to do, so in the end we told them to get stuffed. What they didn't know was that I was learning the PPC ropes so to speak and checking the accounts on a daily basis for the last six months or so of their retainer, and that's when we noticed that they weren't bloody doing anything. Which was a pretty huge deal considering the monthly fee they were charging. If they'd paid me the fee as salary when they got shot of them, I'd be set up for life! [The initials of the company are REDACTED, if you're interested - I'm not suggesting the company you're using is as dodgy!]

But yeah, watch out I guess. Of course, it's your employer's prerogative, so I don't imagine you're too arsed any way. (Unless it's your company, in which case, check up on them.)

Googling $THOSE_INITIALS didn't find them. I therefore conclude they are bad at SEO.

Heh! I made sure that wasn't possible before I posted them - but if devilman is familiar with the company, he'll know straight away I guess!

We do get proof of the work they done, but I appreciate it's not a massive amount.

Apologies for Ian Fairies for derailing the thread somewhat...

Seriously, though -- as I read once, why would an SEO guy have a business card? If they're any good at their job they don't need it...

That's ok. It's an interesting insight. Carry on.

Plus I ain't getting started until tonight when there will no doubt be lots of tedious questions.

Whilst we're derailing threads and on the subject of my old company, it always annoyed me that they were so willing to piss literally millions of pounds a year away on SEO snake oil salesmen and "PPC account management", but they weren't willing to give the developers a few extra grand a year/hire more developers to make the site, like, actually function.

Thankfully, they seemed to be getting that by the time I left as they brought everything in-house marketing wise. Plus, with the Google Panda update, they seemed to get the message that a decent website is much more important than spurious technobabble from flashy suit wearing SEO salesmen.

That's not to say that their SEO methods weren't effective at the beginning when millions of backlinks did the trick, but after that stopped working it turned into an almost comical effort on the SEO company's part to justify their fee with all manner of silly new "methods". And the scary thing is, these guys are likely still raking it in from other companies who don't know any better and are all too happy to outsource the "far too complicated for us to deal with on our own" web marketing stuff.

As you clearly have no idea what you are doing, I would strongly recommend not attempting to design your site yourself. It will either look ugly, cheap, generic or any combination thereof and will make your company look extremely unprofessional. The sites that Trooper and Ramsea linked to are TBH fairly awful and are more likely to put people off. Hideous use of colour and poor layout(looks like a site from the 90s) in the first and utterly dull and generic in the second. With web users used to seeing so many slick, well designed sites, home made web sites can only have a negative effect on a company's image.

For no more than £5-600 you should be able to get a professionally designed site. It will be money very well spent.

Saying that, there seem to be many people who have set themselves up as professional web designers who couldn't do any better and have appallingly poor levels of customer service, so do your research.

Hey, I fumbled my way around and managed to make a fairly nice looking (albeit now defunct and lost to the ether) site!

Hey! That took me 10 minutes, I'll have you know!

Well that's settled that then.

I like your optimism.

Indeed, I don't think my Cupcake website was too bad either It's not rocket science.

muttermutterwhitetextonpinkmuttermutter.

I knew you would say something, and it was pink text on white.

I'm not trying to be negative. If you're trying to set up a business that has to be taken seriously, you've got to look serious and professional. Looking at the sites of other companies in this sector, there's not a chance that an amateur would be able to produce anything that's good enough. Any little glitch or ropy looking graphic will scream out to many potential customers 'cheap and nasty'. A home made site might just about suffice for certain types of business, but in your case the relatively small investment in a professionally produced site is essential I believe.

Hmm, I think that what lets a lot of home made sites down is poor graphic design rather than poor web design. Getting something to work is pretty easy these days. If you had hundreds of pounds to spend you'd be better off buying some art-faggery off someone like Zardoz and using it to create a cohesive image for your company. I know what Burt's saying too, though. Sites which have odd gaps here and there and badly resized graphics never look good but that's just carelessness really, nothing that a bit of time and effort can't overcome. However it's tremendously difficult to do anything more than workmanlike graphic design with no background.

HALP!

I'm buying webhosting. Do I want Linux or Windows?

I've got windows on my laptop if that helps. Is Linux something Mac related by chance?