I'd like to share a new website we soft-launched today for our client Jonathan Rosenfeld. As you can probably guess from the URL, the site is US-based and provides State-by-State collections of Nursing Home injury laws.
Our approach to this website was a bit different than we normally take. Right from the outset, we considered it a collection rather than simply another lawyer website. On the design side, the interface is very browse-centric, with a map graphic driving the homepage navigation. Once you drill down into the State pages (See Illinois as an example), the site identifies negligence and wrongful death laws, and whether there is an applicable Statue of Limitations or Damages Cap for each State. These pages also include links to State laws, general resource links, and any related posts from Jonathan's blog.
This is project we've been working on for a few months now, and stemmed from Jonathan's wanting to do "something different". He already had a blog, along with one of our FAQ collections, and wanted to carry forward with a similar approach. As many Slaw readers can guess, personal injury law can be a very difficult practise to market. Especially when the goal is to avoid digital 'ambulance chasing', and to promote oneself in a professional manner.
Like most websites, this offering will continue to be a work in progress. If you have feedback on features or content that might be added, I'm happy to hear suggestions.
Here's a screen capture of the homepage:
This is a well-designed site, Steve. Beautiful of its kind, even. Congratulations. I'd make one suggestion: the popups you get from hovering over a state all contain the exact same list of "contents", so far as I can tell — which kind of defeats the purpose for them. Better would be if they acted as a linked table of contents to the data "within." Then their sameness would make sense. I should say that I'm looking at the site in Safari on a Mac — it may be that there are hyperlinks that work in other browsers or on other OSs but not in my system.
Simon
Same result using Firefox with Windows 7 – no pop-up hyperlinks.
Curiously, though, the pop-ups DON'T work using IE 8. Clicking on the state does take me to the subpage.
David
The mouseover pushes out the section header titles, but great point – those sections are all virtually the same. … We'll re-think this part.
And thanks David for confirming… I'm seeing the same JS errors in IE8.
Update: Think we've solved the JS issues for IE8, and the bullet menus are fixed. Now accurately showing each State's section headers. Thanks again for the help.
Steven: The hovering / pop-up feature DOES work with IE 7 on Win XP Pro 2002 SP3
Nicely designed site. I like the bio shot at the bottom, looks very professional. Also, has a very marketable domain to boot.