Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

Abstract

For a fourth consecutive year, every website home page of every ABA-accredited law school is evaluated and ranked based on objective criteria. The goal is to identify well-executed sites adopting best practices. For the 2012 report, twenty-six elements are evaluated across these three categories: Design Patterns and Metadata, Accessibility and Validation, & Marketing and Communications. For 2012, there are four new elements, two prior elements have been combined, and one element was dropped.

For 2012, forty-six schools now use the HTML5 doctype, which is up from thirteen in 2011 and just one in 2010. Eighteen schools achieve perfect scores in an adjusted web accessibility evaluation, which is a slight increase over previous years. One of the new elements awards points for use of Responsive Web Design practices, which is a page layout method that shifts the order and number of elements on a page, based on the screen size displaying the content. Our survey discovered fourteen home pages using responsive web design.

As has been the case since this annual study launched in 2009, there is still no objective way to account for good taste. For interpreting these results, please decide for yourself whether any home page is greater or less than the sum of its evaluated elements.

Publication Citation

3 J.L. (2 J. Legal Metrics) 51-76 (2013)

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