Rate Calculator: Lead Generation for Real Estate Attorneys

I am proud to announce our newest product, Rate Calculator (https://rate-calculator.com), the most effective lead conversion tool available for real estate attorneys. 

Real estate law firms spend a lot of time and money on marketing and advertising to drive traffic to their Websites.  However, they have limited options for actually converting that traffic to leads.  A simple "Contact us" call to action is not very convincing.  Most visitors aren't ready to call when visiting the firm's site.  In reality, most just want to know prices.  

Starting a Business

I started my current consulting business about 14 years ago.  Since then, I have enjoyed the privilege of working with businesses and non-profits of about every kind.  I been inspired by many of the passionate people who started those businesses.  In that time, I've had several ideas for different businesses, but due to the time committed to consulting, they have all died on the vine.  I just did not have the bandwidth to invest in these ideas in the way it takes to be successful.  Well, now I have a business idea that I think I can start with an absolute minimum of commitment, at least to

Creating links to ECK Entities in Twig

This post is mostly so I don't forget, as it took several hours to figure out.

Recently, I needed to create some links in a twig templates to various ECK ( Entity Construction Kit ) entity types, mostly to Add, View, and Edit.  Now, it's not really a good idea to try building the paths manually, since the paths may change ( if I update the pathauto patterns or something ).  Routes are much more stable.

In Twig, there are two main functions for generating links, link() and path().  Link creates an absolute URL, while path ( wait for it ) creates a path or relative URL.

Component Driven Drupal Theming

When designing a Drupal based site, there is a killer tool with which most of us are familiar, Paragraphs.  Paragraphs allows us to create a component-based architecture, whereby authors can add components to a page in a structured way.  How can we use the flexibility of Paragraphs to create a component-driven author experience that empowers the author while ensuring a consistent design language?

Stuff Used In This Post:

Seeds Thrift Store

My goal was to give Seeds Thrift Store the look of a high-end fashion retailer.  After looking at several sites, a few common patterns emerged, small headers with just the essential navigation, a large hero or mast head with greeting or special offer, a few teasers, and an Instagram gallery is common.  Most followed a common grid layout with large images of the merchandise dominating the experience.

In my rendition, I included a few key messages to indicate Seeds has more to offer than just a typical thrift store, it's a fashion-forward place for trendy people.  

Creating a Recurring Monthly Newsletter With MailChimp

I love MailChimp.  It does so many things really well, the price is great ( especially if you don't have a lot of contacts, since it's free for less than 2,000 ).  It would seem like the perfect solution for a small business to send a monthly newsletter to it's customers.

One challenge I recently discovered, however, is that MailChimp really wants you to log in and create each newsletter.  While it's certainly a good idea to create a unique newsletter each time, this is not always something a small business will have the resources to manage.

Rogoff & Company

For your project, we started by expanding your color pallet to include colors in the same family as your predominant color, which is a unique shade of red.

We experimented with layout and color variations, that range from very traditional to very modern that pushes some design boundaries of what one might consider for a CPA firm website.  Additionally, for some layouts, we provided some alternatives that are closely related in style, but have a few differences.

Server Based Development

Modern development can be a complicated process, between build tools, deployment management, dependency management, version control, etc.  There are a lot of options out there, and we've spent a reasonable amount of time evaluating existing options and creating a process that works for us, for now.  In the end we reached the conclusion that a server-based development process works for us.  This post explains some of our challenges with other popular workflows, how a server-based workflow solves several of these challenges, and gives some insight about how our process works.

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