Website and e-mail hosting are services for which you can pay a little or a lot with little difference in service. And sometimes you actually get more when you pay less.

For example, I pay $10/month for hosting for my firm website, three blogs (this blog, Caveat Emptor, and Lawyerist), and unlimited e-mail accounts. I get 2 GB of storage—more than I need at the moment—and plenty of bandwidth.

You can find cheaper hosting or more storage for less money, but I like my hosting provider and do not see any reason to move.

On the other end of the spectrum, I know of attorneys who pay $250 per month for hosting from “specialized” hosting providers like LexisNexis/Martindale-Hubbell and Findlaw. These services supposedly offer more traffic, but I am dubious. Basically, they offer a directory listing and a few web site templates, but little else that I can discover.

For about $1,000-2,000, or four to eight months of Martindale hosting, you could instead hire a professional website developer to build a beautiful, dynamic, search-engine optimized, and easy-to-update website, probably with some new stationery to match your new look, as well.

From time to time, take a good, hard look at what you are paying for, and make sure you are getting your money’s worth.

Every Friday for the last few weeks I have posted interviews with solo and small firm attorneys who talked to me about their marketing strategies, online and offline, high tech and old school. Today’s (belatedly posted) interview with Tom Tuft is the last interview.

My last interviewee is Tom Tuft, of Tuft & Arnold Law Office, PLLC. We actually collaborated on a CLE for the Ramsey County Bar Association this winter, which was well-attended and well-reviewed. Like me, Tuft is interested in technology, although he is a gadget man (he carried a Fujitsu ScanSnap in his briefcase), while I prefer one gadget—my laptop.

The Tuft & Arnold website is a good example of a clean, nice-looking, and effective website. It has a lot of information about the firm, its practice areas, and some “handouts” for prospective clients.

Like my own practice, Tuft’s clients tend to hire him only once. This kind of practice requires a fundamentally different marketing approach from a practice with clients who have ongoing legal needs. Instead of cultivating current contacts, one must constantly try to reach new people and new markets.

Keep reading for the full interview.

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Okay, so you are comfortable with online privacy issues, you have spent some time on Wikipedia and Google learning about the “geek stuff,” and now you want to get going and market your law firm online. Obviously, you want to start with square one: a website. And a website is the logical next step in online marketing, so let’s get to it.

When I say “static website,” I mean a normal website: a set of web pages with content that rarely changes, and could be described accurately as a sort of dynamic business card and resume rolled into one. Many people will throw in a brochure-y article or two, but the bottom line is that a static website rarely changes. (A “dynamic website,” by contrast, could be a blog, wiki, or other frequently-updated website.)

A static website is online marketing 101. Every firm should have one, almost without exception. Most Americans have internet access in one form or another. Many will get referrals to more than one lawyer, who they will try to find online. The ones they find will get phone calls. The others probably will not.

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By now, most attorneys are at least thinking about marketing their practice online, if not doing it in some fashion already. But “online marketing” is a concept so vague it is completely unhelpful. Online marketing encompasses everything from websites to social networking sites to chat rooms. Much online marketing is similar to offline marketing, but some of it is very different.
LinkedIn
But whatever your comfort level–both with privacy and with technology–you can find a way to market your practice online. In this series of three posts, I will talk about privacy issues, the necessary technical know-how, and the major ways to market yourself and your practice online: websites, paid advertising, blogs, and social networks.

First, privacy and technical know-how.

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Every lawyer should have a website by now. That is not news, just a fact. Lawyers who don’t have some kind of online calling card, whether a blog, Facebook or MySpace page, or website, are missing out on clients. Period.

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Every lawyer I know either has a web site or want one. Many lawyers have a vague belief that a web site is a required marketing tool “in this day and age,” but few know why that is or how they expect a web site to benefit them.

Web sites

Most law firm web sites are static calling cards that rarely change over time. Without paid-for placement, they rarely show up on search engines unless the search is for the attorney’s or law firm’s name. I call these “calling cards.” They are important to have, especially if you list your firm with an online referral service. As more and more people use the web as their primary method of finding things (directions, phone numbers, address, etc.), a web site is a near-necessity. New clients will call an attorney they know something about before they call one they know nothing about. Unless you come recommended, new clients will often visit your web site before they pick up the phone or tap out an e-mail.

Just the same, calling card web sites do very little to drive potential clients to your firm’s inbox, phone number, or front door. They are a bare minimum for anyone doing business as a law firm any significant portion of whose clients have a computer in the home. In other words: just about everyone.

Blogs

Blogs, on the other hand, are terrific marketing tools if used effectively. A blog, by its very nature, is a repository of information and a pretty good way to store information for easy access. They naturally attract search engine hits because they are chock full of content and natural keywords, and should be updated fairly frequently. Add your picture and contact information, and your blog is also your calling card.

However, an unmaintained blog is worse than an out-of-date calling card web site. (Although a blog can easily be used as a static web site if a lawyer is looking for a very cheap web site design.) Lawyers unwilling to devote a few hours a week, at minimum, to finding material and posting should consider a static web site, instead.

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And, of course, there are combinations, like my firm’s web site, which is fairly static, but uses an embedded blog to keep track of “firm news.” I also update the “legal info” section from time to time with articles and information useful to my client base.

If you are looking to create an online presence, consider careful the options, and if you are willing to put in the time, especially consider a blog rather than a static web page.

A List Apart has a great article on using special characters in HTML. According to the article, decimal codes are the way to go, and you shouldn’t trust FrontPage and Dreamweaver to insert the correct character codes for viewing across browsers.

The article also goes into an illustration–well worth reading–on the differences between hyphens, em dashes, and en dashes, and how to use each:

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