Below is a guest post from Roger V. Skalbeck. Roger is the Associate Law Librarian for Electronic Resources and Services at Georgetown Law Library and author of the Law School Website Design Study 2009.

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During the beginning of 2009, I coordinated a project to collect and annotate screenshots of every law school homepage in the United States, as well as two in England.  This is the Law School Website Design Study 2009, which you can download or read online for free. There’s also a copy available to purchase from Lulu.

All total, this collection includes information on 203 schools, including a dozen data elements for each site.  Included with each law school profile page is demographic information, such as U.S. News ranking, student and faculty data as well as school tuition and library collection demographics.

Within the report, there is also a collection of site design elements with short exemplary collections of favorites icons, slogans, logos, and site search features.

Following are three design insights based on data collected for this project.  By looking at all pages from a specific academic discipline, this gives a useful overview of the state of higher education web design today.

Many sites use CSS for layout, but HTML table layout is far from “dead”.

An equal number of sites use HTML tables for site layout as there are those using pure Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), with 38% each.  The remaining 24% of sites use hybrid layout approaches, where these schools use at least one HTML table to present information on their homepages.

Pixels Dominate for Container Sizing

More than 90% of the sites in the study use a pixel-based measurement for the main site container.  Some designers may prefer using a proportional sizing such as percentages or EMs.  Especially when designing in the days of Internet Explorer 6, this was the best way to create content that could be resized in the browser.

The problem with proportional sizing is that it can be tricky to implement and hard to control.  This is because proportional sizing can create compound problems when nested <div> containers inherit properties and scale content up or down.  With a design that uses the full screen width, this provides flexibility for viewers with wider monitors, but it often creates longer line length and can result in unwanted white space.

760 is the New 800 and 850 is Average

Long, long ago, 800×600 was a common reference size for web designers, as this was the default resolution for many computer monitors.  Nowadays, very few screens are restricted to just 800 pixel display widths.  Nonetheless, over half of the pixel-based sites in this study constrain content to 800 pixels or less.  A dozen sites are implemented at exactly 800 pixels wide, and twenty-seven sites are just 760 pixels wide. From the 187 sites defined with a pixel width, the average width was 850 pixels.

If you have comments or questions about the study, please let me know.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 9:14 am and is filed under Articles, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.