For one thing, the new site combines a traditional black-and-white palette with red highlights and a wide-open, screen-filling design that’s both elegant and modern (the site was produced by local web company rTraction). It’s a unique look, and one of the first rules a law firm website must follow is to stand out from its competitors wherever possible. Law firms, when faced with the opportunity to be creative and innovative, tend to experience a failure of nerve and default to whatever other firms are doing. It’s good to see a firm ready to branch out on a new trail. The new site also features a business law blog, an articling student blog and a community blog, as well as news and events pages and a special section highlighting Harrison Pensa’s expertise in class actions.

But what I especially like is the new site’s focus on the personalities and personal sides of its lawyers. The lawyer biographies are still fairly concise, but they make a point of emphasizing the lawyers’ community and charitable accomplishments. This isn’t a struggle for Harrison Pensa: even among law firms, which often do more than their fair share of volunteer activities, HP is remarkably committed to public service and community work (take the Thanksgiving Turkey Bowl and the Claude and Elaine Pensa Lecture in Human Rights as just two examples). The firm’s lawyer bios are rife with these sorts of activities.

But the site really steps it up with its use of visuals accompanying the lawyer bios. Harrison Pensa has established a reputation for lawyers who are approachable, accessible and easy to deal with — real human beings. The website plays to this strength by featuring many of its lawyers photographed not in the traditional arms-folded business-suit boardroom pose, but engaged in their favourite activities or captured in motion on the way to court, with images that fill the entire page. Here are some prime examples:

• David Williams, managing partner and basketball aficionado
• Cate Crainger, estates partner and musician
• Nawaz Tahir, litigation associate and football coach
• Carol Godby, aboriginal law partner and pro bono leader
• Sean MacKintosh, personal injury associate and hockey coach
• Terry Hainsworth, family law partner en route to court
• Michele Mannering, corporate partner and distance runner
• Jonathon Dunlop, family law associate, lacing up the skates
• Daniel Reason, litigation partner and triathlete

More of these up-close-and-personal glimpses will be added as time goes on, showing clients another side — a side they can more easily relate to — of the firm’s lawyers. Down the road, the firm also plans to add very short videos of lawyers talking about their passions in the law, why they came to specialize in the areas they practise and why it matters so much to them to help their clients. In all these ways, Harrison Pensa means to break from the pack and make one of its strengths — the personal touch of committed lawyers — into a standout brand.

Not every firm would be comfortable with this particular approach, or find that it plays to its strengths, and that’s fine. What’s important is that firms have the courage to be different — not just in their branding, but in reality. The law is perhaps the only industry in which hearing that “nobody else is doing this” is taken as a warning to slow down, not as motivation to speed up. Figure out what sets your firm apart, what truly makes it different, and make that the brand and the promise you bring to the market. If you can’t think of anything that sets you apart, then trust me: branding is the least of your worries.

Congratulations to our friends at Harrison Pensa for a really good new website — one from which other firms could take a lesson.

• Inspired by his experience in litigating cerebral palsy cases, elder and child injuries lawyer Jonathan Rosenfeld launched a new microsite, Cerebral Palsy Lawyers FAQ, which contains a vast number of Q&As, reading lists, and helpful websites and organizations.
• Clio, our law practice management SaaS client, made big news when they announced they’d raised $6 million in Series B funding. Congratulations!
• Gowlings produced a new edition of their guide to Doing Business in Canada, and firm lawyer Gary Graham was the recipient of the 2011 Royal Bank Hamilton Distinguished Citizen of the Year.
• Florida attorney Ron Chapman launched a new firm website for his West Palm Beach criminal defense practice. Ron continues to write his blog at www.justiceflorida.com, where lately he’s covered legally resisting arrest, and a recent juvenile disorderly conduct case.
• Product injury law firm Hissey Kientz launched a site devoted to Propecia side effects, and continued to publish on mesothelioma lawsuits and news, and birth defect cases related to Zoloft and Depakote.
• Jonathan Marshall, who writes the New Jersey DWI Lawyer Blog, is now offering criminal defense legal services in Mercer County, Passaic County, and Morris County.
• BC legal support services provider Dye & Durham continued to share helpful information via its Industry News listings and through BC Law Watch – most recently reminding clients that new rules on telephone appearances on foreclosure applications (PD 33) are now in effect.
• The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association live-tweeted from its Master Class for General Counsel event, at which legal futurist Richard Susskind spoke to a group of 50 in-house counsel.
• At the BC Injury Lawyers Blog, Waterstone Law Group lawyer Kim Briscoe wrote about the recent BCCA decision in Fan v. Chana, which examined the test for whether disbursements for expert reports should be allowed.
• Oshawa divorce lawyer Russell Alexander posted videos to his FamilyLLB blog, including an intro to child support in Ontario, answers to common questions about child support, and collaborative practice divorce in Ontario.
• David Canton, who practises at London, Ontario law firm Harrison Pensa, wrote about the province’s new invasion of privacy tort, and described recent caselaw and legislative developments that support or go against privacy.
• Vancouver and Toronto-based tax lawyers Thorsteinssons LLP were named 2012 Corporate Tax Law Firm of the Year by Corporate INTL Magazine, and two of the firm’s lawyers presented a webinar to CGAs on taxation of trusts.
• Mike Myers, a corporate-owned life insurance lawyer at McClanahan Myers Espey, was quoted in an article on The Street, “Why Your Company May Want You Dead“.
• On Pushor Mitchell‘s Canadian Tax Dispute Blog, Kelowna tax lawyer Matthew Kraemer wrote about section 160(1) assessments, and how taxpayers can be held liable for others’ tax debt.

We’ll be back next month with more interesting client news to share.

This is a major deal, and not just for Clio, which will use the funding to extend its product leadership, develop new functions, and support and expand its customer base beyond the United States. This is a powerful vote of confidence for the entire cloud-based legal services area, from law practice management providers like Clio to the growing number of virtual law practices and online legal collaborators. It demonstrates the seriousness with which outside investors view the extraordinary potential of this burgeoning field.

Boris Wertz, Acton Capital’s Vancouver-based Venture Partner, makes a telling point in Clio’s press release announcing the investment. “The legal space is ripe for disruption,” he says, adding that although the legal industry has been more a laggard than a leader when it comes to the adoption of technological innovations, that’s now changing. Clio’s cloud computing success is just one illustration, albeit an important one, of that emerging reality.

If you’re interested in learning more about this announcement, check out Clio’s blog today for the latest news. On behalf of everyone here at Stem, our sincere congratulations to Clio on this breakthrough funding announcement!

• ideablawg (Lisa Silver)
• James Gannon’s IP Blog
• Lee Akazaki: SQP jeunes avocats | new lawyers’ mentorship
• Le droit au silence (Véronique Robert)
• Canadian Cloud Law Blog (David Fraser)
• HST Blog (Michael Welters)
• Collaborative Practice Canada (Rob Harvie)
• Bonn Law Office Blawg
• Personal Bankruptcy Canada Blog
• SnIP/ITs: Insights on Canadian Technology and Intellectual Property Law (McCarthy Tetrault)
• Canadian Tax Law Blog (Lawson Lundell)
• Employment Law Canada (Kieran Moore)
• Art, Ideas and Brands (Kieran Moore)
• Canada Fashion Law (Ashlee Froese)
• Legal Humour Blog (Marcel Strigberger)
• Ontario Insurance Litigation Blog (Miller Thomson LLP)
• Slater Vecchio Connected
• EntrepreneurLaw.ca (Garnet Brooks)
• Lachance on Law (Colin Lachance)
• Bromwich & Smith, Inc. Blog

As always, if you know of any Canadian law blogs we’re missing, please let us know.

Most common error messages a user is likely to see on your site is a 404 error, or ‘page not found’. No matter how careful you are checking broken links and ensuring everything works correctly on your site, users can still trigger one by typing an incorrect URL, or using an old, outdated link to a long-gone page on your site.

On the Stem site, we like to keep things simple: we offer a plain language message, and display a search box for users to try their hand at searching for the content. This way, if the content is actually on the site, they will be able to access it. The message is displayed any time someone tries to access a URL on the site that doesn’t actually exist.

Some basic things to keep in mind when designing 404 errors:

1. Keep your audience in mind. The average user doesn’t know what ’404′ refers to; however, ‘Page not found’ is understandable, without being condescending to more web-savvy users.
2. Offer alternatives. Display a search box, a link to the homepage, or even a simplified site map. If possible, you could even show content related to what they may be looking for. You can also include a back button to return users to the last page in their browser history, but this can backfire if the page the user was previously on was not actually on your site.
3. If possible, offer to help. This is especially important for sites whose sole purpose is to supply information. Include a contact form or email address; there could even be a phone number to encourage users to contact the company and get the information they were looking for.
4. Lastly, make sure it appears when it should. This may be more of an issue for your dev team, but any time a 404 error is thrown by a website, the tailored message — and not a server error — should appear.

Heinz has a great example of a ‘page not found’ error, as well as a terrible one.

Here is Heinz’s ‘not found’ page:

This error message speaks to Heinz customers. It does not say outright that the page wasn’t found, but, keeping the brand front and centre, they say the page is empty and display an empty ketchup bottle at the bottom (successful product placement without compromising the message). They provide instructions to search the site from the primary navigation. They also display links to main pages, organized by section; even if a user does not see what they were originally looking for, something else on the site could catch their eye. Lastly, the rest of the site’s regular page elements are intact: the site’s design, primary and footer navigation, and company logo. There is a reason this example crops up on many, many ‘best 404 errors‘ lists.

So, how does Heinz also have a terrible example of a 404 page? The above version is only loaded when you type in a URL ending in .aspx – say, “http://www.heinz.com/404.aspx” or “http://www.heinz.com/stemlegal.aspx” — anything with that file extension. As soon as the file extension is wrong — even by using .asp, another valid file extension used on other websites — you get this:

A completely generic server error. This is what users would see when they mistype/forget the file extension, or follow a really old link that pre-dates the site’s use of ASP .NET (.aspx). It’s not helpful, it’s likely written by developers, and, to many, it’s completely incomprehensible.

A friendly site can quickly become unfriendly when it displays confusing or useless error messages. Don’t forget to extend your copywriting, content strategy and branding even to pages you hope users will never see — you won’t regret it!

A number of sites, in fact, saw almost no indexing.

Google itself didn’t go black yesterday; at least not the same way Wikipedia and others did.  But they did show support by displaying a black bar across the top of their homepage logo, and perhaps more telling, supported the protesting sites by holding their place in the search index.

The purpose of the Greenhouse is to discuss Stem’s internal projects and experiments, as well as talk about new technologies, and share code experiments that we’ve done on our own, or for various clients. It’s also an opportunity to share the creative stuff we do with our 20% time. WordPress Wednesdays will continue there as a weekly feature.

The Law Firm Web Strategy Blog will continue to be focused on web topics, such as social media, marketing and strategy, that are of immediate interest to those in the legal field.

If you’ve been enjoying the WordPress Wednesdays posts, and would like to be plugged in to the other interesting, nerdy things we’re finding online, please check out the Greenhouse, or subscribe to its RSS feed.

For an out-of-the-box blog, there is rarely a need to alter what WordPress loads on each page. However, custom queries can be helpful when you need more control over the page content – whether it’s hiding or showing specific categories, changing how many posts load on a page, or just excluding a post or two from displaying at all.

Below, we show you a few basic examples of custom queries. As with all template changes, make sure to back up your theme files before making any edits.

Creating a new query

The most basic way to create a new query in WordPress is to use the query_posts() function; this will overwrite what the WordPress query would normally be and replace it with your new query.

The below query would call posts with a specific category. It must be placed before the start of the WordPress Loop:

<?php query_posts( 'cat=4' ); ?>

<!-- Start of WordPress Loop -->
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

Using query_posts() alters the main WordPress Loop – this means it overwrites any other information that would normally be passed to the Loop, like the pagination, or that the page is, say, a category archive.

It’s a good idea to use the wp_reset_query() function after you have used query_posts(), to return the Loop’s default setting:

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<!-- End of WordPress Loop -->

<?php wp_reset_query(); ?>

Tweaking the existing query using global variables

WordPress stores the query related to the current page in the global $wp_query object. If you just need to change a page’s query slightly, but still want to maintain the other settings (like pagination), you can append parameters to the global query quite easily.

For example, to restrict the global $wp_query object to only one category, you can merge it with your own array containing this parameter, and then make this new, merged query the page’s new query. Place this PHP before the start of the WordPress Loop, and the page will use your modified query:

<?php
global $wp_query;
$args = array_merge( $wp_query->query, array( 'cat' => '4' ) );
query_posts( $args );
?>

<!-- Start of WordPress Loop -->
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

You can also use the global $query_string object instead; in this example, we simply appended our own category restriction, and made that the page’s query:

<?php
global $query_string;
query_posts( $query_string . '&cat=4' );
?>

<!-- Start of WordPress Loop -->
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

Because query_posts() is being altered like in the previous example, it’s a good idea to use wp_reset_query() after the Loop:

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<!-- End of WordPress Loop -->

<?php wp_reset_query(); ?>

Create a basic custom query

Rather than simply appending values the global $wp_query object, it is also possible to create your own WordPress query from scratch by declaring a new instance of the WP_Query class.

Let’s say you wanted to create a query that would select five posts from a specific category — you would create a new instance of the WP_Query class with your query’s parameters. Unlike the previous example, it is necessary to tweak the Loop code to reference this new query. In the example below, we stored the new query in a variable called $newQuery; then, in each instance of the loop, we prefaced the function with $newQuery-> (ie. $newQuery->have_posts(), $newQuery->the_post(), etc.).

A very basic example of this code would look like  the following:

<?php

$newQuery = new WP_Query(array('posts_per_page'=>'5', 'cat' =>'4'));

// Start of modified WordPress Loop
if ($newQuery->have_posts()) : while ($newQuery-> have_posts()) : $newQuery->the_post(); ?>

<?php the_title(); ?>
<?php the_content(); ?>


<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Because you are creating a new query, rather than altering query_posts(), it’s not necessary to use the wp_reset_query() function.

There are many parameters you can use in your custom query, documented in the WordPress Codex.

Dynamically query childpages of the current page

This last example is a little more complex, but can be very useful when using WordPress as a CMS for a regular site. It uses a custom query, as well as the parent-child relationship you can create in WordPress pages.

When you create a custom query that used its own Loop, like in the example above, it’s possible to nest the custom query inside of the official Loop.

In this scenario, on a section’s landing page, it may be necessary to list the ‘child pages’ within that section — this could be very useful, say, on a ‘Practice Areas’ page to list the specific practice groups and link to them.

Within the page’s loop, you can add a custom query that uses the current page’s ID to query its childpages, and then display an unordered of the childpage titles:

<?php
$childPages = new WP_Query(array('post_parent'=>$post-> ID,'post_type'=>'page'));
if ($childPages->have_posts()) : ?>
<ul>

<?php while ($childPages->have_posts()) : $childPages->the_post(); ?>
<li><?php the_title(); ?></li>

<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

In this example, the Loop’s if statement is used as well, so the surrounding <ul> tags are only displayed if there are actually childpages.

Now, when childpages are added or edited, this information is automatically updated on the parent page as well. For a more advanced example, check out the practice area page on Thorsteinssons’ new website.

We’d love to hear how you use custom queries on your own WordPress site — share your examples in the comments!

Two aspects of the guide stood out for me. One is its refreshing emphasis on strategy, relatively rare in such guides and even more rare in law society advisories. Many social media guides focus too much on the “How to” without paying sufficient attention to the more important “Why bother?” Before undertaking any communication or marketing initiative, you have to be able to state clearly and concisely why you’re doing it, what you hope to get out of it, and how you’ll measure your success. Law societies often get stuck in admonishment mode: don’t do this, don’t do that. It’s nice to see that trap avoided here.

The second interesting aspect of the guide is its multiple references to the law of unintended consequences. In one respect, this reflects the more traditional regulatory concern that something could go terribly wrong, so be careful out there and be home by 11. But from another perspective, this really is a timely and necessary reminder. Lawyers share (and then some) the general human tendency towards tunnel vision, the failure to see the big-picture implications of small actions. This is especially problematic with social media: many lawyers don’t appreciate just how powerful it can be — for good, yes, but very easily for destructively, irredeemably bad. One Tweet, one sentence in a blog post, one line in a Facebook update can easily become “viral” in both senses of the word.

Kudos to the Law Society of England & Wales for a social media guide that gets lawyers thinking about both the exceptional and the mundane, and reminding us that the one thing lawyers crave most — control — is the one thing social media explicitly does not promise.

Button Placement

The button generators provided by Twitter, Facebook, Google and others typically assume that you will be liking to a static page with a static name, and the HTML they provide reflects this. Thankfully, it’s very easy to tweak and attribute or two to make the code work within WordPress’s post loop.

Stem’s Law Firm Web Strategy Blog uses a basic sharing button set up — the buttons are placed in the loop after the post’s title, and CSS is used to float them to the right:

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

<h1><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

<!-- INSERT SOCIAL LINKS HERE -->

<?php the_content(); ?>

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

When using the same template for pages and posts, it may make sense to tweak the code so the share buttons only appear on the blog posts, but not on the site’s page (unless you’re hoping someone will ‘Like’ your Privacy Policy!). WordPress’s conditional tags allow you to output the share buttons in specific circumstances — in the example below, the buttons would only appear on the homepage, single posts, and any post archive pages, but not on the blog’s ‘pages’:

<?php if(is_home() || is_single() || is_archive()) { ?>

<!-- INSERT SOCIAL LINKS HERE -->

<?php } ?>

Different Share Buttons

Twitter’s “Tweet This” button

You can use Twitter’s online resources to choose a button type and size that works the best with your blog. After that, you just need to make a couple of adjustments to the code Twitter provides to ensure that the proper link and title is being used when visitors click ‘Tweet This’. There are two attributes — data-url and data-text — that need to be updated to use WordPress template tags for the post’s link (the_permalink()) and post’s title (the_title()). This HTML is added in the WordPress loop, wherever you want the button to appear:

<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>">Tweet</a>

You can then add the below code to an appropriate spot in your template, with the rest of your theme’s JavaScript:

<script>
!function(d,s,id){
var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){
js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}
(document,"script","twitter-wjs");
</script>


Using Twitter’s buttons, it’s also possible to automatically add a #hashtag to these tweets using the data-hashtags attribute:

<a href="https://twitter.com/share" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>" data-hashtags="stemlegal"Tweet</a>

Unlike the other two buttons we’ll be covering, Twitter only has a horizontal orientation for their button, making some button placement options not work as well as others.

Note: On the Law Firm Web Strategy Blog, we use the TweetMeme Retweet Button plugin — it’s handy because the icon is a little more customizable than the options Twitter provides, but since the code is automatically injected into the posts, it can be trickier to place exactly where you want it.

Facebook Like Button

Facebook has a developer’s area that has the code for their Like buttons, as well as their Like Box and Live Stream (amongst many, many other things). The Facebook Like code is similar to the Tweet This code: there is a snippet of HTML that needs to be added inside the loop, and some HTML/JavaScript that needs to be added to the theme.

First, the HTML for the loop, with the data-href attribute updated to use the WordPress the_permalink() tag:

<div class="fb-like" data-href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" data-send="true" data-width="450" data-show-faces="true"></div>


Facebook asks that you add this right after the opening <body> tag on the page; you can also just add it wherever you include the rest of your JavaScript:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>


Google +1 Button

Google also has a page for generating your own +1 button. It doesn’t share posts on the user’s Google+ page (yet) but helps visitors publicly endorse content, and can affect your site’s search rankings.

The following code goes where you’d like the +1 button to appear in your post. The href attribute needs to be updated to use WordPress’s the_permalink() template tag:

<g:plusone size="small" annotation="inline" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"></g:plusone>


The accompanying JavaScript also needs to be added to your template, with your other JavaScript references:

<script type="text/javascript">
(function() {
var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true;
po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
})();
</script>

Google’s +1 button, like Facebook’s Like button, has a number of scale and orientation attributes you can play with to better integrate the buttons to your theme’s layout.

What sharing buttons do you use on your blog and why? Please share in the comments below!

WordPress 3.3.1 is now out! It’s a security and maintenance upgrade that includes a fix for a cross-site scripting vulnerability. Don’t forget to upgrade your site!

• Canadian Legal History Blog,
• ClickLaw,
• Legal Feeds,
• Legal Post,
• Slater Vecchio Connected,
• Doorey’s Workplace Law Blog,
• Legal Frontiers: McGill’s Blog on International Law,
• The Court,
• Entertainment and Media Law Signal,
• Wise Law Blog,
• B.C. Injury Law Blog,
• 3 Geeks and a Law Blog,
• First Reference,
• James Gannon’s IP Blog,
• Youth and Work,
• Catherine Morrisette Avocate
• Henry J. Chang’s Canada-US Immigration Blog,
• Le Droit Au Silence,
• Rule of Law,
• Small City Law Firm Tech,
• Canadian Cloud Law Blog
• Above and Beyond KM,
• John Flood’s Random Academic Thoughts,
• The Intelligent Challenge,
• Canadian Securities Law,
• Strategic Legal Technology,
• The Wired GC,
• Charon Q.C.,
• Edilex Blog Juridique,
• Le Droit au Silence,
• Lee Akazaki,
• B.C. Distance Family Mediation Blog,
• Social Media For Law Firms,
• Thoughtful Legal Management,
• Avoid A Claim,
• Blogue du CRL,
• Library Boy,
• Finding Legal Information,
• Chaire en droit de la sécurité et des affaires électroniques

Full details on this year’s winners can be found on the Clawbies.ca website.  And to see our record number of nominations, please head over to my Vancouver Law Librarian Blog for the 2011 nominations list.  (If you notice a missing nominations post, I’ll be more than happy to add it.)

Happy New Year from all of us here at Stem Legal, and best wishes for a healthy and prosperous 2012!

• Gowlings announced that two top restructuring & insolvency lawyers, Derrick Tay and Jennifer Stam, will join the firm in January, and securities lawyer Kelley McKinnon was featured on CBC’s Lang & O’Leary Exchange.
• BC legal support services provider Dye & Durham released its January litigation calendar, which is full of helpful dates and deadlines.
• Warren Mitchell, Q.C. of Thorsteinssons Tax Lawyers was named in the 2011 Lexpert® Guide to the Leading US/Canada Cross-border Litigation Lawyers in Canada.
• In Kelowna law firm Pushor Mitchell’s latest newsletter, Paul Mitchell, Q.C., discussed massage therapy as an ICBC no-fault benefit and Blair Forrest wrote about expanded securities registration rules. Congratulations are also in order to Pushor Mitchell for raising over $11,000 for the United Way!
• The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association released the Winter 2011 issue of CCCA Magazine.  Feature stories cover anti-bribery laws and solicitor-client privilege in corporations; there’s also an interview with Jim Landress, GC for the Canadian Wheat Board.
• Ronald Chapman, who practices criminal defense in West Palm Beach  FL, published a couple new articles on Florida Criminal Records: one on Florida’s Clemency Law, and a second on the limited discretion Judges have with respect to expunging criminal records.
• Elder abuse lawyer Jonathan Rosenfeld discussed whether nursing home lawsuits are due to isolated incidents or representative of overall poor care. He also compiled a list of tips on making the most of holiday visits to dementia sufferers.
• Product injury law firm Hissey Kientz continued to advise on birth defect cases, adding information on Paxil in the first and third trimesters; newborn heart problems related to Zoloft; and spina bifida and anencephaly related to Depakote.
• Clio, our cloud-based legal practice management client, posted a review of the company’s activities in 2011 – kudos to Clio for their innovative #goneClio podcasts and 2nd annual Apple in Law Firms Survey.
• Fraser Valley law firm Waterstone Law Group welcomed family lawyer Janette Kovacs to its Langley office.
• David Canton of the London, Ontario law firm Harrison Pensa wrote about a new Canadian law regarding mandatory reporting of child pornography by anyone who provides internet access, including those to provide open wi-fi to the public, such as coffee shops and municipalities.
• Oshawa divorce lawyer Russell Alexander announced he’ll be speaking at the 2012 ABA Techshow on the topic of paperless law firms.
• New Jersey criminal attorney Jonathan Marshall discussed cases involving drug DUIs (driving under the influence of prescription or illicit drugs).

Best wishes from Stem Legal for a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!

There are a number of plugins that have built boasting their improvements to WordPress’s out-of-the-box search, but some simple tweaks can be done to refine your results, and improve the search result’s page interface.

The below examples involve editing your template files, so make sure to back everything up before making any changes!

Display the search term on the results page

On the search page, a simple UI tweak can be adding the search term to either the page’s title, or an introductory paragraph.

<p>Your search for <?php the_search_query(); ?> has returned the following results:</p>

Alternatively, when there are no results, you can display:

<p>Your search for <?php the_search_query(); ?> has returned no results. Please double check your spelling, or try a new search below:</p>

Add a <span> around the term with a background color, or emphasize the term in some other way when you output the code to make it really stand out:

Include a search box on the results page, whether results are returned or not

It’s common to display a search box when a search has returned no results, but it can also be handy to display the search at the bottom of each results page, in case the returned results are not what the user was looking for.

Include the below code after the <?php endwhile; ?> portion of the loop, but before the <?php endif; ?>:

<p>Not finding what you were looking for? Try a new search below!</p>

<form class="clearfix" method="get" id="searchcontent" action="<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>/">
<input type="text" name="s" id="s" />
<button type="submit">Search</button>
</form>

Display how many search results have been returned

WordPress returns pages of search results with no real indication of how many the user will be paging through (and how useful their search term was). You can display the number of search results that were returned at the top of the page by using the below code:

<?php
global $wp_query;
$totalresults = $wp_query->found_posts;
?>

<p>Your search has returned <?php echo $totalresults; ?> results.</p>

Combine with the search term to indicate to users how useful their search was:

Exclude categories, pages, etc. from the search results

Oftentimes, there can be categories, pages or posts that you don’t want included in your site’s search results. You can add a search filter to your functions.php file that will exclude specific categories:

<?php
function filterCategory($query) {
if ($query->is_search) {
$query->set('cat','2,3');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','filterCategory');


Alternatively, you can add a similar filter that will exclude an entire post type:

function filterPostType($query) {
if($query->is_search) {
$query->set('post_type', 'post');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','filterPostType');


The filters will automatically be added to all search results that are returned on the site using the WordPress search.

Alternatively, you can exclude pages, posts, categories etc. on the search results page itself — the below code added before the loop on the search results page will restrict the returned result to just posts, rather than pages and posts — just include the below code on your search.php page before the loop:

<?php
global $wp_query;
$args = array_merge($wp_query->query, array( 'post_type' => 'post' ));
query_posts( $args );
?>

Do you use tweaks and plugins to alter your WordPress search results? Please share them in the comments below!

Jump ahead to see the complete code!

The eagle-eyed among you have probably noticed small tweaks to the Stem site and Strategy Blog this past week. As we gear down at the end of the year, I’m putting time towards minor tasks that have been sitting around forever, and one such change turned into a wacky solution I’d like to share.

Unlike the previous two WordPress Wednesdays, this week we’re getting into some PHP and WordPress template tweaking; there’s nothing too daunting here, but as usual, before making any changes to your WordPress theme, make sure you back everything up.

This particular solution all started with the Stem Strategy Blog. As the sidebar archives grew from two years when I started with Stem, to four (and with a fifth quickly creeping up) I decided it was time to reduce the sidebar list to just the last 12 months, and stash the rest of the links on a separate archive page.

Of course, the huge list didn’t look any more readable on a separate page than it did in the sidebar; I decided blocking the list out by year, and adding some headers would help make it more manageable. This is when I started running into problems. WordPress lists archives by using a function called wp_get_archives(); — unfortunately, the function just returns a bunch of HTML including the links to the archive pages, and whatever tags you’ve specified to surround each. You can set the archives to output as daily, weekly or monthly links, but you cannot limit the archives listed by year.

After a bit of searching online, I tracked down a great function for adding ‘year’ attribute to wp_get_archives, put together by Chris Smith:

Add this to your theme’s functions.php file:

function getarchives_filter($where, $args) {
if (isset($args['year'])) {
$where .= ' AND YEAR(post_date) = ' . intval($args['year']); }
return $where;
}
add_filter('getarchives_where', 'getarchives_filter', 10, 2);

Now you can specify a year in your archives, like so: wp_get_archives('type=monthly&year=2010');

This alone would allow me to set up each year with its own header and links. However, as soon as 2012 rolled around (and 2013… and 2014…) I would have to go in and edit this code. The next step is to automate the process: The following snippet gets the current year, and creates an array ranging from the current year, down to the first year of the blog — in this case, I hardcoded 2007, as that wouldn’t change:

$currentyear = date("Y");
$years = range($currentyear, 2007);

Using that information, I could run a foreach loop and output the year’s header and list of archives automatically, going from the current year, down to 2007:

<?php
$currentyear = date("Y");
$years = range($currentyear, 2007);
foreach($years as $year) { ?>

<h2><?php echo $year; ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly&year='.$year); ?>
</ul>
<?php } ?>

Now we’re outputting each year’s worth of archives under its header… in reverse order. This seems to make sense in a sidebar, but seeing it under each year’s header just looked wrong. Unfortunately, there is also not an option to reverse the order when using the wp_get_archives() function. I tried next to save the value of wp_get_archive() in a variable and try to run a loop on my own, only to discover that the output of the function isn’t an array, but a string.

Thankfully, the developer and support community for WordPress is strong and active, and a solution to this problem was in the support forums. The following code ‘explodes’ the wp_get_archives(); string, and loops through it to store it in an array called $links[]:

//get the archives as per usual
//making sure not to output them by using 'echo=0'
$archi = wp_get_archives( 'echo=0&type=monthly&year='.$year );

//split the archives into an array
//using the </li> tags
$archi = explode( '</li>' , $archi );

$links = array();

//using the <li> tags, loop through the $archi array,
//cleaning up the rest of the extra HTML,
//and storing the output in the $links[] array

foreach( $archi as $link ) {
$link = str_replace( array( '<li>' , "\n" , "\t" , "\s" ), '' , $link );
if( '' != $link )
$links[] = $link;
else
continue;
}

Last but not least, reverse the order of the array, like so:

$fliplinks = array_reverse($links);

… output them to the page…

<ul>
<?php
foreach( $fliplinks as $link ) {
echo '<li>'.$link.'</li>';
} ?>
</ul>

… and you’ve got yourself a categorized archive page!

The Complete Code

The code for this nifty trick, in its entirety, is as follows — don’t forget to back up your theme files before making any changes!

For your theme’s functions.php file:

function getarchives_filter($where, $args) {
if (isset($args['year'])) {
$where .= ' AND YEAR(post_date) = ' . intval($args['year']);
}
return $where;
}
add_filter('getarchives_where', 'getarchives_filter', 10, 2);

And in the template used on your static archive page:

<?php
$currentyear = date("Y");
$years = range($currentyear, 2007);
foreach($years as $year) { ?>

<h2><?php echo $year; ?></h2>

<ul>

<?php
$archi = wp_get_archives( 'echo=0&type=monthly&year='.$year );
$archi = explode( '</li>' , $archi );
$links = array();

foreach( $archi as $link ) {
$link = str_replace( array( '<li>' , "\n" , "\t" , "\s" ), '' , $link );
if( '' != $link )
$links[] = $link;
else
continue;
}

$fliplinks = array_reverse($links);

foreach( $fliplinks as $link ) {
echo '<li>'.$link.'</li>';
}
?>
</ul>

You can see the finished product on the new archive page — the implementation right now is pretty simple; if you try this out on your own site, please share what you come up with below!

Inspired by LexBlog’s State of the AmLaw Blogosphere, Law Firm Mobile set out to determine which firms, among the AmLaw 200 and Global 100, had mobile versions of their websites. The key statistics found included:

• 19% of firms on the 2011 AmLaw list now have mobile sites;
• 22% of firms on the 2011 Global 100 list have mobile sites.

From there, the report links to and provides an excellent roundup of screen captures for each of those firms, and also lays out best practices and areas for improvement for mobile legal web design. If mobile design is in your 2012 plan, I would encourage you to see the full report here: LFM 2011: Report on the AmLaw200/Global Law 100 Mobile Web.

At Stem, we believe 2012 will be the year law firms embrace responsive web design – the concept of designing one website that adapts to whichever device it’s being viewed on, rather than creating separate sites for each. (See this collection of examples for a better idea of how responsively-designed websites change according to screen size.)

It won’t be enough to simply test websites in IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox; those who design law firm websites will need to include smart phones and tablets in that mix as well. Fixed-width and minimum-width designs are on their way out; fluid grids and customized, device-sensitive designs will be necessary for firms to make their websites truly mobile-friendly.

As a example of how we’re incorporating responsive web design into our own best practices, see our client Thorsteinssons‘ website – it looks and behaves differently on a desktop computer, an iPad and a smartphone – subtly and intuitively:

Thorsteinssons LLP – iPad:

Thorsteinssons LLP – iPhone:

Side-by-side comparison, iPhone, iPad and Desktop:

If you’ve seen some excellent (or not so excellent) examples of mobile law firm websites, please consider dropping a note in the comments. We’re always on the lookout for great mobile implementations.