April 28, 2017

Southwestern Law School Has a New Website!

Surprise! Southwestern has a new website. Like it?

We had many goals for this website.

1. We strove to make it fully accessible to differently abled people, meeting current industry standards for website accessibility. To that end, all the videos are closed-captioned; all the images have text descriptions; there is high color contrast; and the site is e-reader friendly (tables have headers, there are no nested tabs, etc.). We have software that will check it weekly for broken links and other accessibility issues.
2. We wanted it to be easier to navigate. Most data on the site is now reachable in three clicks or less. There is contact information on the sidebar of almost every page.
3. It needed to be fully responsive to any screen size, and mobile-phone friendly. It is now fully collapsible for any device whether desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone, Mac or PC.
4. We wanted it to be visually appealing. We pulled in colors from the Bullocks Wilshire building and added hundreds of new, larger images. The PDFs are rendered as thumbnail images now, so they pop off the screen and are more noticeable.
5. We wanted to roll in the Student Housing website so that it can benefit from the new site’s search-engine optimization, accessibility features, and centralized search function. That was achieved by creating a mini-site for The Residences at 7^th.
6. We wanted to showcase the Bullocks Wilshire Building to greater effect. We created a mini-site for that as well, with its own sub-menu structure and plenty of new photo galleries.

In short, we think this new website will be easier to view (on any device), easier to navigate, and represent Southwestern well. We hope you are as pleased with the new website as we are.

Note to students, faculty and staff: To get to the portal to check your email, click on the MYSWLAW link in the top navigation bar. To check your email directly, go to swlaw.edu/email.