As an update to my effort to start a law firm, I wanted to let everyone know that my law firm’s website is up and running. It’s located at flanderslawfirm.com.
I am not completely satisfied with it and I plan to make some much needed changes. But, it is up and it isn’t too bad. The best part? I did it mainly by myself. If anybody actually reads this and goes to my website I would appreciate any comments.
I ultimately got my law firm website up and running through a lot of trial and error. To me, starting a law firm is all about trial and error. Why should it be any different with a website?
The first trial was hosting. As I explained in my law firm website hosting post, there are a lot of choices but I chose Winhost.com. To this point, I have been very happy with Winhost and I have no complaints. However, it is early and we shall see how it goes. Through many hours and a lot of head-banging, I was able to read the help forum and “knowledge base” articles on Winhost and figure out how to set my law firm website up using these main, FREE ingredients:
(1) Webmatrix
(2) FileZilla FTP
(3) Internet Information Services (IIS 7)
(4) WordPress.org
The Winhost forums have moderators who answer many questions from all kinds of people with similar difficulties. There are posts about how to use your hosting service for all of these free tools. Again, creating a law firm website isn’t easy, but if you have the time and the gumption you can do it. Those are the free tools and they are great.
Now, the non-free tools I used were:
(1) Winhost website hosting (Cost: $114 for a year of hosting)
(2) NameCheap domain names ($10.00 for a typical domain name)
(3) Elegant Themes templates ($39.00 a year).
That’s it. Easy right? I also think those prices are pretty darn reasonable and I did pay a web designer anything.
Once I figured out how to use these tools, I was able to customize my law firm website. It takes some knowledge of html coding and cascading style sheet (CSS) language, but I picked it all up on the fly.
If anybody needs any help out there on how to start a law firm website, post a comment.