Legal blog tip: Develop consistent style

Jon Gales, editor of MobileTracker blog, in an interview with ProBlogger suggests blog publishers develop a consistent and professional style for their blog.

Gales provides some things to review in developing your style guide.

• Do you use the first, second or third person when talking about your site?
• Are media sources italicized? (e.g. MobileTracker)
• How to credit sites
• How to link to sites (e.g. inline or at the end of the post)
• Image sizes and alignments
• How quotations are denoted
• How updates are denoted

Legal Blogs with a style guide, even if the guide is your head, are going to have a much more professional feel. If you have multiple lawyers or contributors authoring posts, developing a style guide is a must. I have already seen a law firm blog where some lawyers writing to the same blog use all caps for titles while others use lower case for titles. Looked pretty unprofessional.

For those lawyers and firms who have not developed a standard from the start, Gales suggests working on updating your archives. This way visitors from search engines, likely to visit older contently directly, will benefit from the consistency.