Site Redesign

17 March 2008

After a brief hiatus in website administration, the webdesign team has returned to continue work on Corpus Juris. This resumption of design work comes with a few surprises to enhance your browsing and researching.

• New Website Design - old users may notice that we implemented a new template for the Corpus Juris website. The new design provides both an easier browsing experience and ensures that new site features are easily accessible and viewable.
• Browsing Enhancements - new web 2.0 features provide a more efficient browsing experience like instant font-size changes, smooth scrolling, mootools-based drop-down menus, AJAX-based logins, and CSS-based highlight effects.
• Lightbox - the new lightbox provides for browsing images, videos, sounds, maps, and other pages from within the page without leaving it. By merely clicking on a link, the lightbox is activated, and the target media is loaded while staying on the same page.
• Coding Optimizations - even though the new site includes several new enhancements, the design team has implemented gzip compression for all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript file transfers, thus making page download speeds up to 80% faster than an uncompressed transfer.
• Frontpage Slideshow - the homepage will now display the most important sections of the site and breaking news.
• Commenting System - all articles can now be commented upon by readers and supports Gravatar-based avatars. An RSS-based feed is also available for those who wish to subscribe to individual articles’ commentary.
• Social Bookmarking - this feature now allow readers to bookmark their favorite articles with their social bookmarking site of choice.
• Odiogo - this provides for an all-new service which allows readers to have the contents of a page read to them in audio while remaining on the site and be able to download an MP3 file of the chosen article.
• Glossary - the new glossary plugin will provide for definitions of legal terms and maxims when a user highlights certain words or phrases in articles.
• Online Dictionary - in conjunction with the glossary, the online dictionary tool provides for an alphabetical list of legal terms and phrases, pronunciation guide, and word directory.

We hope that these new features enhance your experience and encourage you to entrust your online legal research needs to Corpus Juris. However, the webdesign team would like to state that even more features are already being developed to make an already great experience even better.

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