I’m in the midst of building a family law website for another firm. I’m basically serving as the general contractor for the project. Obviously, I’ve done this before  on several occasions for myself, but I haven’t done it for someone else.

To tell you the truth, I’m having a blast. This is more fun than one person—me—should be allowed to have, and I’m shocked that they’re paying me to do this. I love it.

Let me tell you how I’m approaching the project. This might be helpful for you as you build your site.

1. I had a WordPress expert set up an installation of WordPress on a server we use at Rackspace. We’ve got the site up and running on our server, and we’ll move it to an account for our client. The expert installed all the plugins we use for playing video, creating sitemaps, doing search engine optimization, etc. I wanted to be able to upload the content immediately as it’s created so that everyone involved can see it, edit it, and provide feedback. We’ve kept the location of the site private and password protected it so we don’t get any accidental visitors.

2. I interviewed and hired a writer to create content for the site. I hired a lawyer licensed in the site’s jurisdiction. She is writing a few hundred pages of content explaining all of the pertinent family law issues. I referred her to our family law site as a model but gave her license to branch out as the law in her jurisdiction dictated, and she felt inspired. She’s uploading the content each day so the client can monitor the progress and the accuracy of the work.

3. I interviewed and hired a writer to handle the marketing aspect of the site. She will write the “about us” material. She has a very different skill set from the legal writer. We need her to understand what’s special about the law firm and why it matters to prospective clients.

4. I found a videographer and booked a trip for the two of us to spend a few days with the client filming educational videos for the site. We’re putting a handful of videos on the site to explain the law and introduce the lawyers to prospective clients.

5. I hired a designer to make the site look nice. The client had some ideas about colors and an overall look. We’re getting feedback from the designer and will likely go back and forth.

6. We found a law student to help us locate and upload information in the public domain to the site. This includes statutes, cases, etc.

7. Finally, we’re managing search engine optimization. We’ve got someone doing some research to determine the most valuable keywords for attracting traffic and optimizing the title tags, meta descriptions, and making minor tweaks to the articles on the site.

All seven of these steps are being handled simultaneously. Of course, installing WordPress and the plugins only took a day or two, and it was up and running. The other tasks will take much longer. Our time budget for the project is 90 days, and it’s moving along quickly since we’ve got everything happening in parallel and have so many people involved.

Soon, we’ll have a fine-looking site that serves the public and builds a practice. Unless this comes off the rails in some unexpected way (and I stop having fun), I might even do this again sometime.