Appearances Count

You’re going to make a presentation at a seminar where you’ll appear before lots of potential clients. So, if you’ve got your wits about you, you’re going to polish your appearance before your presentation, and that’s because you know the power of first impressions.

If your appearance is important when you present yourself in person, it’s even more important when you present yourself in print – when you write a magazine article, or a client alert, or publish a blog.

That’s right, and here’s why. When you make a presentation at a seminar, you might appear in front of a few hundred people, at most. When you write something for publication, you might appear in front of thousands or millions of people. When you appear in print, you can make so many more first impressions. And that’s why it’s so important to look good in print.

Get Assistance

As it is, more and more attorneys — from patent attorneys at large firms to family law solos, from the most senior partners to summer interns, from those who can do it well to those who can’t — are publishing blogs to promote their practices. Some are having great success and others are just wasting their time, or doing themselves more harm than good.

Now, I can’t say that you should, or shouldn’t, publish a blog to promote your practice, but I can say this – if you do publish a blog, and if you want it to work, then you’re looking at a fair amount of work.

It takes time and effort to build a successful blog — one that’s effective at attracting potential clients. And it takes skills you didn’t learn at law school.

So, unless you’re quite exceptional or mad, you should realize you can’t do it all (create and maintain an effective blog) on your own.

Sure, there are blogging systems you can use for free, and some are so simple you can get started in no time. But they’re not for you, and here’s why. You want your blog to make you look like a professional, not a high school student.

If you want your blog to look sharp, then you (or, better yet, someone you hire to help you) have to deal with quite a few technical details. That means knowing not just CSS and HTML and XML and RSS, but SQL and PHP or Perl, as well. If you’re not familiar with these things then – unless you’ve got lots of time on your hands – you should find someone who is.

In addition to technical assistance, you’ll need help designing your blog. And this isn’t optional. If you want your blog to attract clients or promote your practice in some other way, it’s got to be attractive.

Fortunately for you, there are graphic designers who also know the technical end of setting up a blog.

Here’s my advice: put out the word that you’re looking for an experienced blog designer, and pick a good one. You’ll need around 10 to 20 hours of quality assistance, which will cost about $35 per hour.

Here’s some more advice: if you’re not willing to get the assistance you need, don’t start a blog. It’ll just be a waste of time, at best.

Pick a Platform and a Host

Creating a blog isn’t the sort of thing you do from scratch, no matter who (how technically savvy) you are. Instead, you pick a blogging platform, like TypePad or WordPress of MoveableType, and that platform handles the vast majority of tasks required to create and maintain your blog.

The designer you choose to help create your blog probably has a favorite platform, and that’s what you’re most likely to use.

Here’s my advice: use WordPress. It’s an excellent platform. It’s well supported, and it offers lots of extras, including a wide array of ready-to-go design templates. I strongly recommend it.

Here’s something that WordPress has that other platforms don’t — lots of third-party support in the way of plug-ins. They handle a wide range of tasks for you — from automatically eliminating spam comments sent to your blog, to hyphenating justified copy.

In addition to a blogging platform, you’ll need someone to host your blog. Believe me, you’ll want to pick a host that offers the following:

• good technical support (so you can get help with technical problems)
• detailed site reports (so you can get details on visitors to your blog)
• easy maintenance (so you can easily upgrade your blog)
• high reliability (so your blog is always available to visitors)

A Word About Readers

Who do you want to attract to your blog? Everyone and anyone? Or a more targeted audience? You need to decide, because if you can’t identify your audience, you can’t serve it, and that’s your goal.

Let’s say your goal is to attract the masses. Fine. Then write for the masses. Don’t use obscure terms like ambit or tort (unless you take the effort to define what they are). Don’t write sentences that contain too many words and too many clauses. Keep it simple.

Here’s how. Since you’re an attorney, you use Microsoft Word, right? Once you’ve written an article, and before you’ve proofed it, check the readability of the article.

Paste the article into a blank Word document. In Word’s preferences panel, select Show readability statistics. Then select Spelling and Grammar from Word’sTools menu.

After Word checks the article’s spelling and grammar, it displays readability statistics, as shown in the figure at the right.

You want a high score (above 50) for Flesch Reading Ease, and you want a low value (less than 12) for Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.

After you edit and then proof your article, check these statistics again. If you’ve done a bang-up job of reviewing your own work:

• The word count will be lower.
• Reading Ease will be higher.
• Grade Level will be lower.

Readers don’t want to do any more work than necessary to get the information they seek. Controlling these statistics will go a long way toward helping you give your readers what they want, which is your goal.

A Word About Design

Twenty-five years ago, Apple’s Macintosh computer was brand-spanking new. And it — combined with the Apple LaserWriter and the PostScript page-description language — had a huge impact on small-scale publishing (and, eventually, on all publishing).

Suddenly, small-scale publishers had access to the equipment they needed to produce publications with art and type, but many had no background in producing artwork and setting type. They had the tools, but not the training.

Shortly after it was introduced, the Macintosh/LaserWriter platform included 35 typefaces. Given so many faces and so many variations on them, plus the joy of the freedom of expression, combined with a lack of the most basic design skills, and society was soon bombarded with publications bearing Ransom-Note Typography — a jumble of typefaces thrown together as if by storm.

Many attorney-authored blogs have a similar problem, and that’s because attorneys don’t know type.

Here’s my advice: see how professional publishers — from the New York Times to the Huffington Post to Salon.com — do things, and follow their lead. Imitate them as best as you can.

Regarding Type

I’m neither an artist nor a designer, so I’m in no position to give you advice on the design of your blog, but I know type. I know it well, and I’m about to tell you what you should look for.

Now, if the designer you picked to help you create your blog doesn’t agree with what I’m about to say, then dump him or her. Find someone else. I mean it.

 

1. Pick suitable fonts

A critical element of serving your audience is making your blog easy to read. Fortunately, that’s easy enough to do. But it’s just as easy to make reading your blog misery.

Here’s a good exercise: go to a bookstore. Go to the new, non-fiction releases, and start browsing. You’ll find that all those new releases have quite a few things in common and one of them is this — body copy is set in a font with serifs, those short strokes you find at the end of the font’s characters.

You’ll also find that:

• Body copy is set with a font that measures close to 10 points; i.e., the distance from the top of a lower-case b to the bottom of a lower-case p is about one-eighth inch.
• Body copy is hyphenated and justified; i.e., both the left and right margins are straight and even, and hyphens appear every so often along the right margin.
• Each paragraph either starts with an indent or ends with some extra vertical space between it and the next paragraph.
• Each line of body copy contains fewer than 80 characters.
• The space between words is very, very consistent.
• There are just about three lines of text per inch (vertically).

This isn’t by coincidence. It’s the result of studying how people read and striving to make reading easier.

Of course, a blog isn’t a book, but here’s the point — if you want to look like a pro, imitate the pros. See what they do and follow suit.

Now, consider the following copy:

This isn’t very easy to read. Not only is the type too small, but the copy is set in a font (Arial) that wasn’t designed for use as body copy.

Here’s my advice: Never, ever use Arial for body copy.

And why not? Without getting into the details, consider this — not a one of those books in the bookstore has body copy set in Arial. Professional publishers just don’t use it, and for good reason.

If you want a good, sans-serif font (one without those strokes at the ends of the characters), for body copy, pick Verdana, a font that was designed for its legibility on-line.

The following copy is set in Verdana:

2. Set those fonts in suitable sizes

Have you ever visited a Web site or a blog and found the type there to be considerably smaller (or lighter) than it is at most sites? In order to read the copy, you have to increase type size.

That’s not a big deal — it’s a minor inconvenience — but you don’t want to trouble your readers at all. The other sites they visit don’t require them to adjust their browsers, and neither should yours.

NOTE: see the last section of this article for advice on what you should do before you publish your blog so that it leaves the best first impression.

3. Set strong contrast from foreground to background

Have you ever watched a foreign-language film where the dialog was set in subtitles, but you couldn’t read it because there wasn’t enough contrast between the text and the background? Annoying, is it not?

Many attorney-authored blogs suffer a similar problem, and there’s no good reason for it at all. Consider the following notice:

There’s not enough contrast between the type and the background, and the last line is far too small.

NOTE: Usually, you can direct your browser to increase or decrease the size of the type it displays. Unfortunately, some Web sites and blogs don’t allow you to do that. For their sake and yours, make sure that readers can adjust the size of the type at your blog. And if they can’t, you’ve got a problem.

4. Use white space to good affect

Effective use of white space is critical to your blog’s appearance. White space helps guide the reader; it shows where one thing starts and another ends.

As with all other elements of design, it’s good to see what the pros do.

You’ll find that they don’t do this:

Instead, they make effective use of white space, like this:

Here’s another example. Instead of this:

The pros do this:

They don’t run text so close to images. That, plus they keep text and graphics aligned (e.g., the top of an image aligns with the top of a block of text).

5. Use heads to good effect

Imagine you’ve published a 3,000-word article giving an overview of copyrights. Someone — a potential client, perhaps — finds your article after a quick Google search.

That someone wants to know what’s involved in registering a copyright. Fortunately, you have a section that explains that clearly. But, since you didn’t use heads to good effect, the potential client can’t find what he or she seeks, at least not without spending too much time.

What does he do? He gives up and looks for another article.

Here’s my advice: when an article consists of more than just a few paragraphs, use heads and subheads to reveal its structure.

And be as consistent as you can in how you word heads. If you put all the heads and subheads from an article in a list, it should be easy to follow. It should be the outline of the article.

6. Use lists to good effect

Studies have shown – over and over – that readers scan Web sites and blogs for information. They don’t read articles from start to end as if they were stories. So, you want to make scanning your blog as convenient as you can. One way to do that is to present information in list format.

In your daily work, you encounter lists like this:

. . . including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits or confidential or other information, for business interruption, for personal injury, for loss of privacy, for failure to meet any duty including of good faith or of reasonable care, for negligence, and for any other pecuniary or other loss whatsoever . . . .

If you want to attract readers to your blog, you want to present that sort of information like so:

. . . including, but not limited to, damages for:

• loss of profits or confidential or other information,
• business interruption,
• personal injury,
• loss of privacy,
• failure to meet any duty including of good faith or of reasonable care,
• negligence,
• any other pecuniary or other loss whatsoever . . . .

Word the lead-in so that the elements of the list are as short as can be. And use parallel construction for the list elements; i.e., the lead-in followed by any element should read like a well formed sentence.

 

7. Use punctuation to good effect

Way back when, copy was set without punctuation. All characters were of the same case, spaces didn’t separate words, and a period didn’t mark the end of a sentence. If we still did things that way, we’d be reading copy like this:

Fortunately, we’ve got a variety of tools we can use to assist modern-day readers, and one of them is punctuation, which can be a powerful aid for readers, making what you wrote so much easier to follow.

Here’s some advice about punctuation:

Use a comma to indicate a pause.

Let’s say you’re proofreading an article before you post it. And let’s say you pause at a spot, like at the end of a prepositional phrase. Make sure there’s a comma right there. If you don’t put it there, then the reader has to do it himself, and that’s inconvenient.

Use semicolons to divide compound sentences.

In your daily work, you often use semicolons to separate items in a list when those items are long, complex, or require their own punctuation. You don’t want to do that in the articles you write for your blog. Why? Because people don’t like to read long, complex items in a list.

What they want is:

• Short,
• Simple, &
• Sweet.

Use the serial comma.

Most attorneys don’t bother to use the serial comma, the one that comes just before the conjunction that introduces the last item in a list. Now, I’m not going to bother to explain why you should use the serial comma. Instead, I’m going to tell you this story:

One day, a panda strolls into a restaurant. He orders dinner, eats it, and then when he’s done, he pulls out a gun. He starts shooting the other patrons.

The waiter pleads with the panda. “Why are you doing this?”

The panda reaches into his bag and produces a very poorly punctuated book on zoology. He tosses it at the waiter and says, “I’m a panda. Look it up.” And then he leaves.

The waiter opens the book, and there he finds the explanation.

Panda — Large black-and-white bear, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.

Here’s my advice: when it comes to your blog, follow the rules. You can find them in the Chicago Manual of Style.

Note: The AP Style Guide says not to use the serial comma. Forget it. Your blog is not a newspaper, and you can afford the little bit of space that comma consumes.

8. Don’t justify copy without hyphenating it

Here’s something that professional typesetters really strive for: consistent spacing between words. Why? Because inconsistent spacing is a burden on readers.

The pros don’t do this:

Instead, they do this:

In other words, when they justify copy (i.e., set it so both the left and right margins are straight and even), they hyphenate it.

Follow suit. If you justify the copy at your blog, make sure you hyphenate it so there’s consistent spacing between words. (Fortunately, there’s a WordPress plug-in that will do this for you.)

Here’s my advice: make it appear you use a modern computer, rather than an old manual typewriter, to prepare the copy for your blog.

 

9. Don’t act as if you’re using an old manual typewriter

There are certain things that attorneys and paralegals haven’t had to do for years and years. (Remember the mimeograph machine? If so, shouldn’t you be in retirement by now?)

Ever since the IBM Selectric was introduced in the 1960s, it’s not been necessary to:

• Use monospaced fonts like Courier.
• Use underlines to indicate italics.
• Use hyphens in place of dashes.
• Use tick marks for quotes and apostrophes.

And it’s been that long since French spacing — the quaint practice of putting two spaces, rather than one, at the end of a sentence — has been fashionable.

Once again, I recommend you latch onto a good style guide and follow it. If you do, then you’ll:

• Use dashes for dashes, rather than hyphens for dashes.
• Use quotes and apostrophes rather than tick marks.
• Use accents (e.g., set résumé, rather than resume).
• Set one space, rather than two, after a period.
• Set titles — including the names of cases — italic.
• Use bold and italic for emphasis.
• Use hyphenation to justify copy.
• Use underlines only for links.

Testing! Testing!

Before you publish your blog (e.g., make it available on line), you need to test it. You need to make sure it looks OK to others, and that it works OK, as well.

You can’t assume that since it looks and works OK on your particular computer, it’s going to look and work OK for the masses. That requires some testing.

Have you ever visited a Web site or blog, and things just don’t look right? Columns aren’t where they’re supposed to be, or one block of type appears right on top of another, or you can’t select items from menus. Whoever published that didn’t polish it first, otherwise, it would have seemed fine to you.

There are companies that will do this for you, or you can do it on your own if you’ve got some hours to spare, as well as access to a variety of computers running different versions of operating systems and browsers.

If your blog isn’t OK with the most popular combination of browser/operating system (which, right now, is Internet Explorer version 7 and Windows XP), it doesn’t stand a chance. However, being OK with the most popular combination doesn’t get you all that far — just over 25% of the market.

If you want you blog to seem OK to the vast majority of the market, then you need to test it on BlackBerry and iPhone, in addition to IE7 and Vista, Firefox, Safari, and Macintosh. That could take a few hours. You might be better off spending a few hundred dollars and having your blog tested by someone who knows just what to look for.

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