Beginning this year, several faculty members at Georgetown Law have started using the course management system TWEN (The West Educational Network).  Students can also find course materials on a courseware system developed in -house several years ago.  In addition, there are some reserve materials available in the library, and syllabus materials are distributed through a centralized service.  Because having so many options can be confusing to our students, we try to link to all services at the same time.  On websites we manage, this is easy enough, so we can provide course information links on a main student page, an orientation page designed for new students, and other places. Westlaw recently added a feature to TWEN to let law schools customize a banner on the system.  In addition to providing a logo and link back to the law school, there's enough room to include a few links.

To allow us to include several links, we looked at setting up a dropdown menu with categories of links.  While letting us provide course information sources in one place, this also lets us link to services like Hein Online and our E-Journal Finder, which provide important course materials not found on Westlaw, the quasi-default source for legal information on TWEN.  Here's what it looks like:
 

This menu uses a version of the something called the Sons of Ursidae Menu (thanks Sara K!) which requires no JavaScript and can be rendered with only a few lines of CSS code. The dropdown menus don't work in Internet Explorer 6, but the four links under the Georgetown logo point to pages that contain all items.  We're going to look at changing our main site navigation menu (which uses Open Cube's Infinite Menus), as it requires more complex CSS and complicated JavaScript.

One interesting thing about our custom menu is that Westlaw's blue and grey color scheme match nicely with the school's main colors.

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