Welcome to ULaw.Today!
Some of you might be wondering where this new site came from. And why would we separate our news off of the SJQ home page like this?
The Short Answer:
Our main page at www.law.utah.edu was just too cluttered. Furthermore, we could only really show one box of news at any given time, and that one box was usually dominated by a single topic. ULaw.Today gives us the ability to present much more news from far more sources in one, comprehensive place.
There. That was easy, wasn’t it? And you thought this would be a lengthy explanation. Then again, if you had your heart set on a longer one, read on.
The Long Answer:
With Google’s help, we (the development team of Aaron and Aaron) are able to keep a close eye on the traffic we get to each of our sites. We receive weekly reports about which pages are most popular, what order people visit them in, and what city they’re visitng from. We gathered up information spanning the last two years, and spent a long time analyzing the data. What the numbers told us was clear and surprising: the vast majority of visitors to our main page are current and prospective students looking for information specifically for–wait for it–current and prospective students.
And not necessarily for our latest news.
With these numbers before us, we took a look at our current web page and asked ourselves the questions: who is our website for–for us, or the people making over a quarter million visits to our prospective students page? And how well are we catering to their needs?
The answer to the first was easy, and we each gave ourselves a gold star. The second? Well, we took our stars away.
There was a time, before I worked here, when I was considering going to law school. I visited a number of law school websites, and I clearly remember my experience at www.law.utah.edu. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say that my level of frustration at finding what I wanted to know about this school was, perhaps, above acceptable levels. Let’s think about it this way. Have you ever seen anything like this? ↓
No. You haven’t. Because people don’t talk like that. And they don’t think like that, either.
And yet, we, along with hundreds of other schools, set up our web pages as if they do.
It’s time to change that. People come to our site with questions, and it’s our job to answer them–not hand them a bunch of links that may, or may not, lead to their answers and hope for the best. When it launches, our new main page will do just that, and most information will be available in no more than 2 or 3 clicks. Our websites are our digital storefronts, and ours will soon be much more attractive–and useful.
Which brings us all the way back to ULaw.Today. When people want news, they want news–not our reciprocity policy. And that’s just what ULaw.Today is going to give them. News. It’s the same with our media site, ULaw.TV.
If you’d like more info on how to use the new sites or why we made the changes we did, talk to Aaron Herd or Aaron Dewald. And please, don’t hesititate to send us your suggestions.