The Interwebz has come a long way since its early days of Web sites that contained loud colors and dancing hamsters.
Today, users expect a site to not just introduce them to a company or an organization; they also expect it to immerse them in information and to offer some sort of interactivity with the site, its creators and the community that frequents it.
We don't expect anything different from law schools.
Like businesses and organizations, some law schools have crafted their sites to not only present information to prospective and current students, instructors and the public at large, but have also turned them into doorways for joining their law school communities.
Innovative schools have embraced RSS, Twitter, Facebook, streaming video, and other innovations to keep up with the times, as shown in a study by Roger V. Skalbeck of the Georgetown Law Library.
Are you a Brooklyn Law School student who just has to know what undergraduate universities your classmates graduated from? The school has its own version of Facebook called Face Book. Do you just have to know what’s going on at the University of Virginia School of Law in realtime? You can follow UVALaw on Twitter, or you can subscribe to its news feed using RSS.
According to Skalbeck, the Law School Website Design Study was designed to figure out how law schools decide what elements to incorporate into their homepages. The result is a 228-page report that details design elements for each of the ABA-approved law schools’ websites, includes screen grabs of each of their homepages, and gives an overview of some of the newer webby elements that some schools are using.
I have dutifully gone through all of the schools and written a review on each of the schools' websites.
Just kidding.
I did, however, arbitrarily pick two schools from each of the four US News tiers to do a quick comparison of what they’re doing in terms of social networking and information sharing.
Tier 4: Thomas Jefferson School of Law and Thomas M. Cooley Law School
Thomas M. Cooley: Like Thomas Jefferson Law, Cooley doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed, a Twitter stream or an official Facebook/Myspace page.
Tier 3: McGeorge School of Law and Southwestern Law School
McGeorge School of Law: The school’s homepage contains links to various pages within the site, but still no sign of social media.
Southwestern Law School: The site is very much like McGeorge’s, with links to information for students, without any RSS subscription button, Twitter or social networking link.
The rundown: Much like the Tier 4 schools, these schools offer much in terms of information, but their sites offer little interactivity beyond email.
Tier 2: Pepperdine University and Florida State
Pepperdine University School of Law: The site looks pretty basic, but does have a link to the university’s iTunes U page, which contains conversations with Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia among other law-related lectures. There are also several news and event RSS feeds you can subscribe to.
Florida State University College of Law: The site is super basic, and I imagine it gets the job done. However, no new media type things here.
The rundown: I really like that Pepperdine offers downloads of events and lectures on iTunes. It certainly doesn’t replace visiting the campus, but it does give prospective students an idea of the types of events that take place on campus and the sort of academic discourse that takes place there.
Tier 1: Yale and Harvard
Yale: The Web site is surprisingly basic. I guess they don’t really have to try because they are ranked number one. Still, I was a little disappointed, as I had been expecting some sort of mind-reading robot. You can find the Yale Law Library on Twitter, but there doesn’t appear to be a link on the homepage.
Harvard: I like the clean layout of the homepage, which includes a nice news and photo slideshow. The hompage also includes a link to something called Sidebar, which looks to be an internal social networking site that “brings together the Harvard Law School community through shared academic and professional interests, group collaboration and mentorship opportunities.” Apparently, you can also sync your Sidebar profile to your Facebook profile if you have one. Very cool. Another cool feature is MyHLS, which is also linked from the homepage. You can drag and drop various widgets for multiple RSS feeds to create a customized news page. Harvard Law also has a Twitter account, but doesn’t have a link to it on its homepage.
The rundown: I love how Harvard is very Web 2.0 without smashing you over the head with it. And I know that I haven’t assigned rankings up to this point, but of all the school Web sites I looked at, Harvard comes out on top.
Have you come across a cool feature on a law school Web site? Share it here!
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Posted by: Differentdry | December 06, 2009 at 10:08 AM