A New Look . . . Lycolaw Updated

Over the past few months, the official Website of the Lycoming Law Association has taken on a new look.  While the work is not yet completed, and some pages may have still have an odd or unfinished look or may be missing headers or navigation bars, the changes are well underway and the goal is to have most of the major areas of the site updated by the end of January 2012.

The updates to Lycolaw.org, will make the site more user friendly and bring it into compliance with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)  standards.  That means that Lycolaw.org will look nearly the same in Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome browsers.  Pages should look as intended.  And all of the pages should work as expected.

The site is now 11 years old, and has evolved significantly in those years to a source for information and an archive of court and LLA events, documents, and historical information.

The work on updating and revising the site began with the news article archive in late summer 2011.  Nearly 600 articles were manually updated and republished, in about a month.  The pace quickened at the end of October on receipt of an ominous email from our Website host, 1and1.com. According to 1and1, support for the FrontPage Extensions would be discontinued in 2 weeks! 

When originally conceived, the ultimate size and complexity of the site was not imagined.  The site was created with a user-friendly Microsoft program called FrontPage.  That program was discontinued after 2003, but the use of the program and its features continued for years afterwards. 

FrontPage used "Extensions" that were located on the host server to make Websites created with the program work.  All of the pages on the Lycolaw.org site used some FrontPage features to work properly and to have a uniform appearance.  When support for the extensions was cut on November 14, 2011, colors of text changed, page headers and footers disappeared, navigation links were lost and page appearances were quite different, all in the blink of an eye.

In the weeks since that change, hundreds more pages have been "fixed."  In the process, the pages have been made compliant with standards designed to ensure uniformity in Website appearance across the world.  Microsoft specific coding has been eliminated.

Of course, years of experience with the site has allowed for improvements in navigability and functionality.  Searching for articles and court opinions requires fewer steps as the searches can be made from every page.  A better organized and more functional local rule section is planned.  The attorney directory, the most heavily used feature on the site, will be consolidated and will provide more useful information in a single screen.

So . . . please be patient as the changes are implemented.  Mistakes will be made, and corrected.  Links will be broken, and fixed.

As always, your Webmaster appreciates comments and suggestions and, most importantly as the site changes are implemented, your help in ensuring that everything works as expected.  Please report any bad links, or pages that are not working properly.

With the changes in place, Lycolaw.org will be in great position to continue to serve the Lycoming County bar for a long time to come.