The Only Official Thread of the Weekend! WDT 4/8/11

The current website budget is 2.6 Wendy's chicken nuggets, so it's not exactly like I can hire professional designers. I have to work with what I can do for free, and with my background in English and Philosophy, that's not terribly much.

On the other hand, people who read that shit are folks like the ABA Journal and the Village Voice. 90,000 hits in the first month, and oddly enough, I've also received some comments from people who like the design. I think people who stare at MS Word docs all day are less put off by all the white.

 

I gotta say, as somebody in this field, Frebis is right. Your homepage is too long, too segmented and doesn't create any visual focus. There's not really any direct call to action, and you're ironically doing your writers a disservice by featuring them all on the homepage. Trust me, I know how hard it is to manage a text-heavy site with a bunch of talented writers, but even people who know and want to visit the site are going to have a hard time.

EDIT: It is hard to design a great website with no background and a shoestring budget. But you've got some advantages that other new sites don't have (namely two published authors with built in followings), and it sort of feels like you squandering them.

 

As a southerner, I just can't wrap my head around living anywhere that cold, especially in April.



I just started a new side job and have the shittiest hours available. I have to be there at 8 in the morning so I'm thinking I'll ensure I get to sleep early by drinking early. That makes sense right?

And has anyone else been watching the baby bald eagles? I think they're awesome.

 

I'm going to do a little free design for you:

Take those three podcast boxes to the left. Now delete them all. Make a link on the main page that says podcasts. They can click there if they care what you and corman are masturbating to this week.

Now see all those other content boxes? I don't know what in the fuck they all link to, but you should probably delete them also. Add them to a links section.

There is no "about" this website link, which would be nice. But I guess if I was an unemployed lawyer living in my parents basement in Alabama, I wouldn't want the general public knowing that either.

 

The past two weeks have fucking drained me. The vet has been out every day to check on my sister's horse. She has already asked me for a loan, and hasn't seen the bill yet. I am going to try to do what I can. I put in just under a grand to get my truck back on the road. I need new tire, but I can't afford them.

I am flying the coop this weekend. I am going fishing down south. The "guide" knows some great trout and grouper spots. I don't give a fuck if I see a fish this weekend. I am looking forward to being out on the water, in the sun, with a drink in my hand. I love to fish, so if I catch one, that will just be icing on the cake. I need to let loose for a while.

 

Billy, you should add the web address to your sig. Whoring yourself out here should get you up to 90,002 hits easy.

Or, maybe only racists are reading it.

 

Not as easy as it sounds. All the little boxes are Joomla modules, and while I'm sure there's a way to have different modules appear on different pages, getting them to behave that way is beyond what I know how to do. I don't have a media player plug in that works within articles, rather than as a module.

 

The drugstore on my corner is now selling tap beer in 64oz growlers and I'm thinking of getting one since they have a few local brews that look good. How long will the beer stay good in a growler before it goes flat? A few days? A week?

 

I think only a few days. But the real question is why it would take you a week to drink 64oz of beer.

 

Why are you using Joomla? Why not worpress or squarespace? You make me want to learn this Joomla just so I can help you out.

And dude, come on...your logo looks like you made it in MS paint. Someone here has to be able to step up and give you something a little more professional. (see logo below)

Edit- I typed foursquare instead of squarespace. Im a rere

 

The Game of Threads begins!

 

If we're talking about the website I visited it and spend a solid minute or so trying to work out what the fuck it was about.

The title gives nothing away, the sub-title is even more obscure. There is no about page or anything. If I didn't recoginise phililawyer I wouldn't have had a clue.

I've worked with Joomla before and found I could do Ugly and Functional, or Pretty but Unfunctional, getting both is hard.

Personally I'd go for a clean a simple wordpress site that people can just easily dipp into. Think Tabloid rather than broadsheet, the content need not change but it's all about how you organise and present it. The contents great though, really enjoyed the articles there.

After all the talk I think I'm gonna try one of those galliano cocktails at a bar tonight. Galliano, vodka and orange juice. Sounds good.

 

Joomla comes with a built in system for running advertising banners, that's sort of a big plus.

I've been working on it, but haven't gotten the Gaussian blur to work right to smooth out the text though.

 

The site is aimed for the legal community, and most of our traffic comes from other law websites, or from the writers directing their readers to it, so I think they're less confused about what the site is than someone who just stumbles in off the street. The long term business plan focuses on having a small, homogeneous, and relatively affluent readership, rather than a broad based hodgepodge.

As for Wordpress, Joomla comes with a built in feature for running banner advertisements and keeping up with the number of impressions and click throughs. Also, there's generally 5-10 short news posts per day, and a normal Wordpress blog layout would bury the meatier articles.

Edit:

The sub-title is a line from The Paper Chase.

 

Do you have some sort of newsletter? Having an affluent audience is pretty useless without a product or call to action. I could see some sort of subscription model working (in terms of delivering the best in law news/analysis), but nobody is going to just randomly send you a lot of money because you have an interesting site.

 

The legal community has several very expensive, niche products that they use, like bar review programs and legal research tools. The hope is that we can land one or two of these whale companies, like WestLaw or BarBri as advertising clients.

Our main competitor sells ads from $8-30 per 1000 impressions. They run several ads at once, and are probably doing combined $50-70 CPM. Couple hundred thousand hits per month, and you can see how this isn't a terrible business model.

We're also going to use the site to promote books written by the contributors. Right now there are ads running for Phila and Rob's books, and I'm working on an LSAT prep supplement, and a book on the Constitution, so those would be the products we're pushing.

 

Who would want to buy these products from a person that can't maintain a job in the industry he is writing about? Those kinds of things are written by experts. You know what it takes to be an expert? I'll give you a hint, it is more than a degree.

Did you not ask yourself these questions when you started this venture?

 

Can someone link the website in question, and how much do they charge for their porn?

Without having seen your content yet, BL1Y, have you considered putting your law commentary/analysis in video form? If it's a vanilla commentary on the current happenings of the legal world, something like that would translate perfectly to YouTube. I could be way off base here, but everything I've heard regarding your site's vision makes me think, "The Young Turks, only with more lawyers and recreational drugs."

 

It's pretty risky to rely on one or two companies for the bulk of your income, especially if it's only via ads. I'd look into a newsletter, especially considering how text-heavy your site is. I'd also add a half-dozen blogs into your google reader (if you haven't already) because internet shit moves fast.

 

I'll assume you haven't taken the LSAT. Being a lawyer doesn't make you any better or worse at it, since it has nothing to do with substantive legal knowledge. The book is going to be a primer on deductive reasoning, aimed at the skills you need for the LSAT, and having been an LSAT instructor and also a logic TA, I kinda know what I'm talking about.

The constitution book isn't going to be deep legal theory on substantive due process SCOTUS decisions or the dormant commerce clause. It's more the stuff you should have learned in high school, mixed with a lot of sarcasm.

But you know what, you're probably right. Fuck if I enjoy doing this stuff, better to just not even try.