WordPress for Collaborative Practice Websites

Many, if not most, Collaborative Law professionals have never built a website.  Of course not — we are lawyers, therapists, and financial professionals, not IT experts!

However, having a website you can manage yourself is a big advantage.  It allows you to keep it fresh, to make changes easily as ideas occur to you, and even to add new content (blog anyone?) when you have the time or inclination to do some writing.

Many of us still subscribe to an outdated model (assuming we HAVE a website).  We hire a website designer to create a website for us, and when we want to change anything, even a few words, we contact the designer to make the changes for us, paying through the nose to have it done.  Besides the expense itself, the problem with this model is that it discourages us from making changes.  When it takes that much process, and comes with a bill, we tend to just let the website sit until change becomes critical.  A website that just sits become stale, it doesn’t reflect us as well as one we continue to put energy into, and it is going to get less attention from search engines, meaning the website is not working as hard for us as we would like it to.

While not the only solution, WordPress has been a great answer to this problem for many non-technical professionals and businesses.  If you can type, you can manage, and even build, a WordPress based website.  Basically it allows you to pick a pre-designed look or have one customized for you (called a “theme”).  You then click on a button to create a page.  For the page, you type a title and you type content for the body – it is basically just creating a document, like you probably do every day in some form or other.

There are tools to do more complex things, like determine the order of the tabs for your pages, create indexes, tweak the look, etc.  These are not hard to learn, but you may still want to have a designer help you with the elements you can’t figure out.  The key is that you don’t need to go back to your designer for every little content change you want to make.  You can always open an existing page and make changes just like any other document you work with, and you can create new pages just as easily.

I should point out that this website is a WordPress website.

For more information about how to set up a WordPress site, go to pjcoaching.com.