Halsbury House Blog Site

Creative brief

LexisNexis in the UK publishes a number of magazines in which there are blog type columns from legal practitioners. To increase our online exposure and build our brand as an organisation that is at the leading edge of legal commentary we are launching HalsburyHouse.co.uk. Halsbury House is the headquarters of LexisNexis in the UK and Lord Halsbury are infamous within the legal profession.

The subject matter of the blogs will range from amusing perceptions of working as a lawyer, venting about a piece of legislation or a judgement that is controversial, academics talking about the impact of new law or musing on laws that need changed, objectively commenting on new laws and new appointments within the legal profession whether judges, barristers or solicitors in large firms.

The target audience is the UK

The site will not have a large marketing budget behind it so the design must be implemented in such a way that makes SEO standards/best practice incredibly easy to meet. Likewise accessibility standards must be met

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Look And Feel

The website must feel like an authoritative source. The readers are going to be lawyers and those that work within the legal profession in a capacity. It is likely that there will be a degree of readership from the general public. At the same time it should not feel stodgy, heavy or dull there needs to be some elements of lightness and enjoyment readers should chuckle whilst reading the blogs.

The site will be of great general interest and it is likely that the media will refer to it as well. At a later date we may consider running opinion polls on the website which would drive further interest from the newspapers (off and online)

The users may not be IT literate ) so navigation should be simple and design clean. It must be clear at all times where you are on the site (by using a breadcrumb trail).

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Design Constraints

The site will be built with a Content Management System (Joomla)

Text must be used wherever possible (even in the site title, block titles, navigation, tabs, etc) and your chosen font(s) should be universally available to all browsers.

There will be very few graphics except for the logo and the icons listed below and there are very few photos in the content. It will be a challenge to make such a text heavy site look good.

Advertising on the site will take the form of featured jobs from our legal jobs site www.newlaw-jobs.co.uk and links to our legal magazines

The LexisNexis logo must appear on the site preferably at the bottom

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Reference Sites

and see attachments

Other sites

http://timesonline.typepad.com/baby_bari...

http://blog.geeklawyer.org/

http://www.ukcjweblog.org.uk/

http://www.corporatelawandgovernance.blo...

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3 Pages Are Required

- Front page this should be the front of Halsbury House. There should be five floors with a lift /elevator in the centre. There should be a floor plan/directory as department stores have which indicates which blogs are on which floors. The idea is that you go up the elevator to the floor of your choice. Attached is a photo of Halsbury House are you able to create additional floors and remove traffic signs?

- floor landing page this should show all the bloggers that are on this floor with their photo and bio the main content block should be the latest postings from all bloggers in chronological order

- a bloggers page this will show the bio and pic of the blogger and then main content will be a chronological listing of their postings most recent at the top archive on the right hand side and a means of navigating around the site

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Technical

Images Required

- a simple logo (and associated favicon)

- probably no background image(s) / patterns

- no graphics for navigation (must be text)

- no animations

Size

- 1024x768, centered

- two fixed width columns. A fat column on the left, and a fat column to the right

- the thin column is for navigation, the fat column are for content

Page Structure

- Register and Log In options should appear on all pages

Colors & Fonts

- plain text, visited and unvisited hyperlinks

- text input boxes and textarea's

- pulldowns, radio buttons and checkboxes

- lists of items

The sizes and names of all fonts used will be required.

Icons

- favicon

- number icons 1 to 9 for numbered lists

- an opinion poll icon

- printer icon for printing the page

- icon for sending email

- icon for linking to this page

- RSS icon/share this page/bookmarking

- help icon