Introducing the new IJ.org

Since 1996, IJ.org has served as the digital home of the Institute for Justice. Since then, millions of people have visited IJ.org to find out about our cases, watch our award-winning videos, download our strategic research reports and support our activism projects. In 2010, we even won a prestigious Webby People’s Voice Award, often called the Oscars of the Internet, for our cutting-edge online presence in the law category.

Although the website has seen a number of facelifts over the years, until this year we have never undertaken a complete overhaul. In March, we began assessing our strengths and weaknesses and defining the different groups of users that access the site. From the start, our goal was to make the site more intuitive and informative, while effectively communicating the human face of our clients, who are the core of IJ’s mission.

Overhauling a website that has been around for nearly 20 years is no small task. IJ.org has served as the institutional archive of IJ’s nearly 200 cases. It housed more than 2,000 press releases and thousands of other articles, reports and activism projects. All told, as part of the redesign, we overhauled more than 10,000 separate pages.

After working all summer, we launched the new website in early October. The new design puts a human face on nearly all of the work we do. It works seamlessly between desktop and mobile devices, and it makes learning about IJ’s work engaging and informative.

To check out the new website, visit IJ.org.

Justin Wilson is IJ’s director of communications.

Visitors
Since 2008, when we first started tracking website visitors, nearly three million users have accessed over six million pages on IJ.org. Over the past seven years, the number of visitors to the site has nearly tripled.

By the Numbers
Almost all of the work to overhaul IJ.org was done in house, by IJ’s communications team.

• We wrote 21,424 lines of code.
• We input 10,487 different articles, press releases and other pages.
• We selected and uploaded 3,084 images and 906 PDFs.
• We organized 139,644 distinct data points (“metadata”), such as a case’s filing date or the name of a client.
• We created a mesh of connected pages totaling 10,657 connections.