Many years ago, I hired someone to create a logo, business cards, letterhead, and even a website for my law practice. This person was terrific to work with, and I recommended the designer to all of my clients. But I noticed that the professional used templates to create websites and that some WordPress plugins were broken. My experience led me to learn how to build websites.

Instead of paying hundreds of dollars for someone to use a WordPress theme, I bought all of the Genesis themes for WordPress and started creating websites for myself and others. I never charged for my help because I considered it a hobby.

More recently, my experiments with websites expanded beyond WordPress. For hanisarji.com, I use Jekyll. I am constantly improving the site. In forthcoming posts, I will write about how I display an alert when I use affiliate links, my latest improvements to the site’s breadcrumbs, and using CSS for numbering headings.

Along the way, I learned valuable digital marketing skills in addition to building websites. I have considered offering such services as a paid consultant. But, for now, I am more interested in building the membership side of hanisarji.com. I possess a wealth of valuable information about trusts and estates (including outlines, clauses, and forms) that will be tremendously useful to others when it is packaged correctly.

Updated 12/4/2021:

  • I revised this post to remove to any specific references to people or companies. I intended this post as a brief account of a journey and not a critique.
  • Stating that someone uses templates isn’t a criticism. As a lawyer, I use templates all the time. Lawyers are taught to use templates as a starting point, instead of reinventing the wheel. We continue to improve and refine templates as we practice.
  • I wrote that my journey with building websites started “[m]any years ago.” It began over ten years ago, and it has expanded and deepened to include learning how to program. Yesterday was a typical work day:
    • For my legal work, I continued updating my residential lease templates. I continued studying the New York City Housing and Maintenance Code. I updated my research on residential leases, and revised a useful table that gives an overview of landlords’ duties. Then, I updated my document assembly package. My goal is to generate leases (and other legal documents) by answering a few questions. I’m using Docassemble to translate what I learn into code that a computer understands.
    • For my hobbies, I continued learning about technology. I took notes on transclusion and continued studying Mastering Regular Expressions: Understand Your Data and Be More Productive.