Berkeley Law On the Web

In a web site redesign, people are understandably anxious to see how the new site will look. But just as you can’t build a house without architectural plans and blueprints, you can’t really build a complex web site until you map out the site navigation, or information architecture.

This week, we came up with the top-level links that will live on the home page. These are what I call penciled in stone, meaning they may change a little, but hopefully not much.

Here’s how it looks:

Main top-level links:
About Us
Admissions
Our Faculty
Centers
Clinics
Calendar
Newsroom
Academics
Alumni Network
Library
Berkeley Life
Giving

Secondary links:
For Students
For Faculty and Staff
For Employers
Directory

One of the key concepts here is that we are segregating content that is mostly relevant to prospective students and outsiders from the utilitarian content for our internal community. Many educational institutions create navigation schemes that co-mingle this content, ending up with vague links for “students’’ and “faculty’’ that don’t make clear who is the intended user. We want to avoid that and get people to their content more quickly.

We’ve also added a Berkeley Life link because one of the features that distinguishes us from other law schools is the engagement and vibrancy at the school itself and the amazing geography and social community in which the school is located. While talking with many students who came here from other parts of the country, we heard that we should be touting our wonderful location in the Bay Area more.

You’ll also notice a new Calendar link. The implication is that we will soon have a more comprehensive centralized web calendar for the whole school, something many commenters on this blog asked about. Rest assured we are working on that.

Soon, White Whale will give us some designs to look at, which we’ll try to share here.

That’s all for now.

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Let’s face it, our current “Students” page leaves a little to be desired. Lots of useful links. No real dynamic content. How would you beef it up to make it more useful? One suggestion we heard last week was to list upcoming events and deadlines that are relevant to students. What else? Use the comments section below to share your thoughts.

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Hi folks. Welcome to the law school’s web site replacement blog. I’m Michael Bazeley, and I work in Communications and Marketing here at Boalt as the editorial director of electronic media. We have officially begun the process of replacing our current web site with something more useful, informative and, we hope, visually appealing. We’ll use this blog to share progress reports and to solicit ideas and feedback.

A little background on the project, which is being managed by the Communications team and the Instructional Support and Technology (IS&T) team. I’m not calling it a “redesign” because it’s more involved than that. We are ripping out the back end of the site and replacing it with a new content management system (CMS) that will make it easier to keep the site updated with fresh content. At the same time, we have partnered with Oakland web development firm White Whale Web Services to create a new site structure and design. With luck, the White Whale team will pop in here on the blog every once in a while to tell us what they’re up to.

At a meeting last week with some students and the web team, a student asked White Whale whether they’ll be working on this project “over the next year.” On the contrary, this will be a fast-moving, months-long process. Though we are not yet ready to share a “launch date,” you’ll definitely see a new web site well before the end of the calendar year.

Some quick ground rules about this blog. Although we welcome all comments, positive and negative, please keep them constructive and civil. Also, when commenting, please mention whether you are a student (current or prospective), staff or faculty member, or alum.

In the next post, I’ll direct a question to students about how they use the site. Please chime in with your comments there.

Thanks for reading, and we look forward to your involvement as we create the new site.

(Note: On the right side of the blog we’ve added a little form for people who want to follow this blog via email. Just enter your email address and follow the directions, and you’ll receive email updates whenever we post new blog entries. You’ll also notice a ShareThis button under each entry. That allows you to easily email a blog entry to someone, or to send a link to a myriad of third-party services.)

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