Lawyers Love Web Spam

Have you ever searched for legal content online? If you do, you'll quickly recognize that lawyers love spam. Well maybe that's not fair. The SEO agencies of law firms love web spam.

Most of the time, lawyers have no idea what their SEO agency is doing on their behalf. They don't know of the possible harm that it could cause to their professional reputation. They don't realize that it could even get them into trouble with their state bar.

Usually, all they know is that they need to rank #1 for a couple of terms that they think their clients are using to find them. Which is a problem in and of itself.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, you better know who you're hiring to market your practice online. And you better know specifically what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Responsive Web Design

I've always reasoned that, eventually, from a coding standpoint, there wouldn't be a discernible difference between sites coded for the "desktop web" and the "mobile web". And while we're not quite there yet, responsive web design is getting us much closer.

What Is Responsive Web Design

From Wikipedia:

Responsive Web Design (RWD) essentially indicates that a web site is crafted to use Cascading Style Sheets 3 media queries, an extension of the @media rule[1], with fluid proportion-based grids, to adapt the layout to the viewing environment, and probably also use flexible images.[2][3][4][5] As a result, users across a broad range of devices and browsers will have access to a single source of content, laid out so as to be easy to read and navigate with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling.

Stem Legal  is in the process of switching their site over to a responsive design. Check out the way it re-formats depending upon whether it's on a desktop, tablet or smartphone. Very good-looking theme I might add.

As many more people spend a lot more time on mobile devices, webmasters will need to be more conscientious about how their sites appear on these devices. And, at least for the sites that I frequent, many need some major updating.

FB Stock Price

I don't know much of anything about how FB stock price was initially calculated or the intricacies of IPOs generally. Which is why I wouldn't go out and purchase shares. Unfortunately, many people that likely know even less than I do, did buy FB stock.

Some of them likely purchased it on the advice of someone else. Whether it was someone inside the industry who they trusted, or a neighbor, many people didn't make the decision to buy FB completely on their own.

Others probably bought it because they just like using facebook. Is that a good reason to buy stock? Maybe, in a completely free and transparent market. But obviously that's not the kind of market that we have now.

Will facebook stock eventually pass its initial price? Very likely. But I suspect it will take a lot of time and some very clever innovation from inside the company.

You see, something that I know a little bit more about is how people use the web. And while almost one-billion people use facebook to tell the world about what they ate for breakfast and display pictures of their babies, facebook still isn't their access point to the web. It also isn't their primary online information retrieval device. Search is. And search has intent, which facebook does not.

I doubt that advertising will be the one-hundred billion dollar solution for facebook. It will require some genuine innovation. It might look something like premium functionality apps, similar to the iPhone/Pad/Tunes ecosystem.

Or something we haven't ever seen before. Which is hard and not guaranteed. Things stockholders don't like.