In an online business forum to which I subscribe the question posed was “How are you posting/linking your blogs to your firm website?
What an insanely great strategic question. Surely you want to connect your blog posts to relevant content on your website. And just as certainly you don’t want to be bothered with building all kinds of links every time your post a blog. So what to do?
What we have found to be effective is a little technical but not too complicated. Stay with me while I wander into geekdom. Using syndicated content via RSS technology, you can literally subscribe to your own blog and have links to your blog posts appear on pages of your website.
Let me illustrate this point. Take a look at this page of our website. In the right margin, you will see a heading called “Recent Posts” and links to 3 recent posts from the company blog. Whenever someone in our firm posts a blog on our website, a link appears magically under this heading using RSS.
For your website, you need only allocate some real estate on the pages you want your log post headers to appear. Then do some fundamental internet plumbing to implement the RSS technology necessary to grab those headlines and post them on the page. It is truly magic and requires no manual intervention. Post a blog, presto, link appears on the pages you want them to.
We’ve decided to produce the Web Content 2007 Conference in Chicago this June. This conference brings together nationally recognized technology, content and marketing authorities to present the state of the art in web content management.
After successfully running our Content Matters seminars for the last couple of years, it seemed to me that a symposium in the Midwest focused on content management would fill a void. There are seminars on search engine optimization, email marketing, ecommerce, web design and more, but what really unites all these web components is content. Content is king and all these other things are just members of the royal court. Our focus is helping organizations achieve business results on the web. We know the path to achieve this is content management. Web Content 2007 will light the way.
With the help of Scott Abel from The Content Wrangler, we’ve recruited over 25 presenters and organized a 2 day conference on June 18 & 19, 2007. Local luminaries such as entrepreneurs Howard Tullman and Jason Fried will join with presenters from AOL, CareerBuilder and many more to provide an eclectic yet in-depth view of web content strategies and tactics. A handful of sponsors have also signed on to help us out.
We’ve got this great conference space in the new UBS Tower and I’ve purposely limited attendance to under 150 people to create an intimate event where people can effectively network with each other and the presenters. In addition we’ve scheduled this event in early summer when Chicago is in bloom. The chemistry is right. Just add attendees and stir.
There they go again. Microsoft’s recent release of Outlook 2007 undoubtedly has some cool new features. But if your company is among the tens of thousands who send high quality and informative HTML email to your permission-based email subscribers, take note – and take action. It often seems that when Microsoft burps, everyone else gets indigestion. This seems to be the case with Outlook 2007.
In Geek-speak, Microsoft has replaced the reasonably compliant Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine with the Word rendering engine. Got it?
Here’s the English version for the rest of us: Microsoft has removed support for many established web standards in Outlook 2007. This means that your HTML email is possibly in peril of looking ridiculous-or at least not as you intended. The trend has been to increasing standards-compliance within the wild internet environment. For example, standards compliance permits our websites to have a consistent look regardless of the site visitor’s browser. This facility is now being diminished in Microsoft’s latest gift to email users, Outlook 2007.
What to Do? Here’s some recommendations:
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Quiz your email service provider about their intentions to deal with this new reality. It is outside their control. But you (and they) should know what to do about it.
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Test your emails in Outlook 2007. Although your firm may not be adopting this new application quickly, chances are your nimbler or more tech savvy clients are.
The email service provider that Duo has partnered with, ExactTarget, has produced a Whitepaper to address this matter, Seven Design Tips for Outlook 2007, which can be downloaded from our website. The options are not grand, but there are options. And thanks to ExactTarget for their as-usual proactive approach to the ongoing challenges of getting quality email into the inbox.
For years I have witnessed accolades and awards heaped on
law firm websites that are, for want of any more accurate word, dysfunctional. More
often than not these sites are eye candy with a bell here and a whistle there -
Stylish sheet metal and little under the hood.
What makes a good law firm website? I have my opinion.
Others do as well. But whatever a firm believes makes a website good should be
measurable. Hunches, hearsay and anecdotal evidence belong in the choir. Only
measurable and demonstrable metrics qualifies as the diva. My mission was
clear.
At the 2007 Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Annual
Conference on March 21, 2007, I have the opportunity to present “Checking the
Oil Level and Tire Pressure of Your Firm’s Website.” We will explore measuring traffic generation
tactics, goal-oriented behavior at the website and measuring online reputation.
I am honored to be the first to provide an in-depth review
of web analytics metrics for professional services firm. I know I don’t have
all the answers. But if we can get a conversation going about what a website
should do (and how to know), not just what it looks like, I will have advanced the
dialog.
