Easy Law. It seemed a doodle when I thought of it. Write about law for ordinary people and make it easy to understand. However it is actually really hard to do.
The first articles, for module one and the first week of module two, were relatively straightforward as I had already written about those topics in the past. Then I hit trust law.
Trust law, agency law and land law have been really hard to write. This course is not degree level, I just want people to understand a bit about how it all works, illustrated perhaps by a few cases. So I need to be careful not to get too technical. Which is difficult with subjects with such a lot of specialised terminology as trust and land law.
I have been helped considerably by getting some of those student revision guides, as they allow you to see the structure clearly, and also ensure that I don’t miss anything important.
Although I have cut a lot out as not being relevant to the course. Leaving me with a framework of bullet points which I can then illustrate with narrative. I think maybe they still need a bit more tweaking …
Html and css
It may not be necessary to know html to do an online course but it certainly helps! To start with I wrote the articles in word, and then transferred them to my html editor and put the code in.
However I am now writing directly into the html editor. I have two.
- On my PC I am using an editor by a company called coffeecup which was recommended by Gill my web designer. Its really good as it has a preview screen, and will also add code such as bold and italic, paragraphs, links etc, automatically by highlighting the text and then clicking a button. I have been using the program a while but am only just starting to find out about and use these features properly
- On my macbook, I use a less sophisticated program called text wrangler which I downloaded free from the internet (I had to pay for the coffeecup one). I have to put the code in by hand and it does not have a preview screen, but I can always preview pages in the browser.
The files are saved in dropbox (affiliate link) so I can get at them from either machine.
I don’t mind putting the code in by hand actually, it allows me time to think about what I am writing. There is always a lot of pondering going on.
The trouble is, code does not always display how I want, which is where the css comes in. CSS stands for cascading style sheets, and is a system where colours and styles are set out in a special page which then applies to all the content pages.
For example the different heading codes, h1, h2, h3 etc all have different colours on my style sheet. So if I want the heading to be orange, I use h3.
I get very annoyed sometimes where the style puts spaces in where I don’t want it. For example under my bullets. Leaving a huge great gap between the last bullet and the next bit of text. Gill does the style sheet for me so we have had a lot of back and forth with me complaining that spaces under bullets are making my contents list look stupid and her having to add new styles etc.
I think it is looking pretty nice now though. Its bright and cheerful and hopefully the variation in the colours and bullet styles will make it easier for people to absorb the content.
Moving forward
I have now finally reached the point where I can start talking about tenancies rather than background law. I am also looking forward to working with some of the other lawyers who are going to help with interviews and other content. Onwards …
You can find out more about the course >> here.