Web Dev Blog

I recently completed a ranking analysis of 195 law school home pages, entitled the "Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2009" The entire report is on SSRN and will be posted elsewhere later. This report looks at fourteen separate design elements, which were evaluated in November/December 2009.  Elements were given weighted values to equal 100 points for a perfect score.  Nobody got 100 points, but the survey reveals some interesting details about the state of law school home pages.

Here are some interesting numbers, showing how many schools out of 195 some of the elements surveyed:

• Use at least one microformat element: 4
• Define at least one Dublin Core element: 4
• Use embedded media (audio or video) playable directly from the page: 11
• Have a favicon defined: 144
• Display one or more social network badges/links: 47
• Include a picture of a smiling face: 170

The printed results will be in the Green Bag Almanac and Reader 2010, which is sent to most Green Bag subscribers. The version on SSRN is identical to the version to appear in print. This project may be repeated again next year.  If so, it will be interesting to see how much things change this year.  Suggestions for improvements are welcome, and criticism and complaints are okay too.

Read on for a list of the point values as well as a full abstract for the report. 


Element Name and Points Assigned:

• Address 10
• Search Box 10
• Cascading Stylesheet (CSS)* 10
• News Headlines 6
• News Headlines with Images 7
• Embedded Media 5
• Favicon 7
• Smiles 5
• Social Network Link 6
• Content Carousel 6
• RSS Meta Information 8
• Microformats 6
• Dublin Core 4
• Hierarchal Organization* 10

* partial points possible for these elements

Perfect Score 100

Abstract:
The website home page represents the virtual front door for any law school. It’s the place many prospective students start in the application process. Enrolled students, law school faculty and other employees often start with the home page to find classes, curricula and compensation plans. Home page content changes constantly. Deciding which home pages are good is often very subjective. Creating a ranking system for “good taste” is perhaps impossible.

The ranking report "Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2009" includes a tabulation of fourteen objective design criteria to analyze and rank 195 law school home pages. The intent was to count only objective criteria to attempt to find the best sites. All law school home pages were ranked based on a weighted analysis of these criteria. Pictures of the ten best sites are included in the report, followed by a full tabulation of all schools evaluated for the report. The goal was to include elements that make websites easier to use for sighted as well as visually-impaired users. Most elements require no special design skills, sophisticated technology or significant expenses.

This entry was posted on February 18, 2010 at 4:28 PM and has received 25671 views. Print this entry.

If you work at an organization that runs Microsoft Exchange, you can probably share contacts and schedules fairly easily. The only problem is that these features mean nothing if you can't find email and sort out all of the messages that sit in your account. There are now two current programs in beta that attempt to make Outlook email much better. The latest one is called ClearContext Personal. The personal edition is free right now, with a professional version to be sold at a later date. The main features are intended to let you organize email better, browse attachments and leverage some existing (but often underused) features of Outlook that color-code your contacts for priority, and let you apply automatic sorting rules to conversations and contacts.

To work most effectively, you probably want to rely entirely on the ClearContext way of repackaging Outlook, which may require slight changes to your email reading habits. Whereas the program Xobni reindexes your email and presents your options mostly in their separate windows, ClearContext is more integrated with specific features of the Outlook application. Possibly the two can coexist on the same machine, but probably they are two alternatives to consider.

Here are three screen shots of ClearContext to see how it appears:
A view of the attachment explorer in context of the Outlook 2007 email client

and this same image closer up

ClearContext options for reorganizing your email sorting and performing other operations to make messages easier to manage.

TechCrunch has a good overview of some core features of ClearContext Personal.

This entry was posted on June 16, 2008 at 11:34 AM and has received 38257 views. Print this entry.

If you use Outlook for email, you probably loathe the idea of having to search for a message. Being able to sort columns by date/subject/author just isn't enough, and the default search is painfully slow. This week a new program was released (well, it's now in public beta) that can make Outlook so much more useful. It's Xobni (that's Inbox spelled backwards).

Xobni is an Outlook add-on that lets you search and sort your email, while also revealing an interconnected network of relationships between you and people you email. Once installed (it requires the .Net framework), it lets you see this how often you've emailed each person, it gives you a list of attachements you may have exchanged, and shows the connections between people you've emailed. It also has some intriguing things like a bar graph of showing the time of day each person typically sends email and an inbox/outbook barometer.

You can also search each of the indexed categories, and the search uses a nice autosuggest feature. For instance, here's a list of documents I have traded with somebody with 'lic' in the title:

Xobni has really opened my eyes to what Outlook should be (why is 2007 so ho-hum??). It's interesting that Xobni was founded by a former Yahoo! vice president of social search, and the company just rejected a reportedly $20 million buyout offer from Microsoft. Whatever the case, it works really well. I just hope it doesn't break anything, since it's beta software and email is critical for my life.

Xobni is essentially a really good and user-oriented index of your email. Some see it as adding social networking aspects to email, but to me this tends towards exaggeration.

If you only use Gmail, maybe a program like Xoopit is the 'social solution' you're after. Apparently, "Socializing Your Inbox Is Inevitable"

This entry was posted on May 10, 2008 at 1:17 AM and has received 38192 views. Print this entry.