I opened my own solo law practice in January this year, which has been exciting. It has been a good time to think about what I’ve been doing with my law license for the past few decades and what I’d like to be doing over the coming years. These issues hit home while I was designing my new law firm website, which I recently launched.

I decided to design the law firm website myself because this site will evolve as my practice evolves. There are some amazing website design tools out there. I started with a WordPress base, combining that with a theme called OceanWP. I am a novice at HTML coding, but found a way around that hurdle. Elementor is a site builder program that lets you actually design your site as though you were a knowledgeable coder. It took a few days (and many instructional videos) to figure out how to make these programs play together, but it all started making sense. What’s really amazing is that all of these programs are free, and that is the main reason I’m sharing this post. If you are a non-coder looking to custom design a website, check into these three tools.

I’d like to publicly thank Jen McKnight for the logo she designed for me. I really appreciated that much the process of designing the logo is a conversation where she grilled me about who I was as a lawyer. That required a fair amount of soul-searching. Then I stepped back as she boiled that conversation down into that elegant little mark that appears on my new website. Jen who is a UMSL professor who teaches graphic design.

The photos to use on a website are always a challenge. I’m not comfortable putting big photos of myself out there, because it seems crass. And I’m hesitant to smile on photos because I’ve long been self-conscious of my imperfect teeth. But then again, the site is about me, so my image needs to be out there. On a lark, I hired “Sophie, the 13 year old daughter of a friend who was delighted to put my Canon 7D Mark ii to work. It’s a heavy camera, but Sophie was patient with my direction and my attempts to present a decent expression. In the end, some of her photos looked enough like me (to me) and those pics appear on the site.

I took some additional photos that appear on the site, several of them from downtown St. Louis, where I often practice law. I wanted to place two inspirational quotes on the site, and those are photos I took on Mt. Takea, Japan and Cappadocia, Turkey.

Now that things digital are in place, it’s time to think of worthy uses for my law license. My life has already involved many exciting long-term journeys, and I’m honored that fate has given me yet another chance to set sail.