Our Law School’s New Website

Our law school has a new website.

It’s an improvement in look and feel.

In integrating the design of the University’s page, it serves as an important reminder of the law school’s connection to the college. This connection is often forgotten, but with the increased visibility and popularity of interdisciplinary approaches to the law (law and economics, feminist theory, law and religion, etc), the closer a law school and university interact the better.

The important thing to remember, for those who follow such things, is that this is an important step forward. The site organization is hugely improved and things fit together a little more neatly. It looks better than the old site and looks more like other law school websites. It’s also important to remember that law school websites are difficult. Pure and simple. Who’s the primary audience? To what extent should your website be the same as those of other schools?

That said, it still misses an opportunity to use the school’s online presence as an effective marketing presence. Overall, there are no regular communications tools that engage the user – blogs, e-newsletters, etc. Along with this point, it carries over – at least at this initial launch – the shortcomings of the old site.

I don’t intend for this to become a bash session, but I’ve listed some concerns here and welcome you to suggest some other ways to improve the site. If we have some constructive ideas, I’ll send them along to the school.

There are several things that I think make Catholic Law unique:

• highly respected clinical programs
• a reputation among law firms and employers in town that outpaces our US News rankings
• significant focus on social justice
• collegial environment and good facilities
• good speakers that focus on issues of the day (including an ongoing series of panels at the National Press Club focusing on various issues)
• highly regarded securities and communications law programs
• growing focus on jurisprudential studies and, at the same time, wider offerings of professional skills courses
• respect for the role of religion in society

Yet, when you push through the website content and organization, these are not the things that jump out at you. While some of these may be addressed as they finalize the launch of the new design, I’ve listed the things that jump out at me.

In terms of navigation, how do you get back to the homepage once you’ve drilled down into a section of the page? This no longer applies to all areas of the site, but there are still some places where you can’t get back to the homepage.

Many of the event detail pages are available only in .pdf. See, e.g., the event on the homepage called “The Consequences of Human Differences.” Why can’t I access an html version?

Where are the law review/journal pages and information? And why isn’t the Commlaw Conspectus, a very well respected Communications Law journal highlighted? (Having these included under publications might help.)

The “Latest News” “feature” on the front page does not allow you to link to more information about the event allows you to link to more information about the event, but it’s static – you can’t comment on it, or give you a link to save to twitter, facebook, delicious, StumbleUpon. (Folding the latest news into a blog for the entire site could remedy this.)

It is hard to find the clinical programs. (Placing clinical programs higher in the navigation choices or having clinical work and achievements being a prominent feature could remedy this.)

Professor scholarship is hard to find. The location of student achievements and organizations are not immediately apparent. (These are things that could easily be listed under “news” and could also be highlighted in the blog.)

Blogs that are on there are dated, unupdated. Seems to me that  you should just drop them or develop an editorial calendar for them and stick to it. (I’m suggesting that the site have ONE blog on which all of this information is posted. This will act as a funnel, so to speak, linking the user to the other static components of the site.)

Video and audio of events are actually posted (buried, really) in the undergraduate website. Having these more prominently available (perhaps via a vimeo or youtube page) would be helpful and make the site more engaging.

What did I miss? Or am I being too critical?

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