If you visit Landlord-Law today, particularly if you have not been there for a while, you will find that it has become rather, well, bright! We have had a bit of an upgrade.
After a rather depressing start to the year (for various reasons) I decided that things needed a bit of a shake up and commissioned my web-designer, Gill, to do me a radical new web-site design. “Nothing is sacrosanct”, I told her, “well, apart from the logo of course”. Naturally therefore a new logo was one of the first things she did.
It’s a bit different, the new site design. But after all there is no law which says that legal web-sites should be boring, and it is certainly not that. I told Gill that I wanted bright colours (“proper colours”) and put an absolute ban on all pastels. Bless her, she did a stonking design.
“What do you think about having a few pictures?” she asked hesitatingly, one day (Landlord-Law 1 being almost entirely text based). “Yes”, I said, “why not? Perhaps a few”. Which is why you now see at least one photograph on every page, together with Wils cartoons, which I decided to use more lavishly (after all I do have about 6 years worth!)
The use of photos grew like Topsy. After uploading a couple, I was so stuck by how nice they looked, that I decided to use a few more … It was then quite a job to find sufficient. All of our holiday photos have been raided, and in additional I took quite a lot of pictures locally – luckily Norwich has a wide variety of housing types, so I could do the full range, from modern flats to (only one so far) a thatched cottage, plus endless terraced houses.
Most of the photos are by me, the majority taken within about 20 minutes walk from where I live, the rest having been taken on holidays and on the way home from a recent trip to Manchester. My husband took a few, and there are a few purchased photographs from http://www.istockphoto.com. I intend to change the photos from time to time and upload new ones as and when I take them – a new interest in life!
Another new feature of the site, is that it incorporates this blog! If you have not accessed the blog from the site, take a look – it is here.
Of course it is only when I have to check it over that I realise what a very large web-site Landlord-Law has become. I seem to have been working night and day on it for weeks on end (well about three I suppose) so it will be nice to step back a bit, and have a break. Although there are quite a few new things I want to do for the site, and my publisher is talking about a new book …