Why Change a Good Thing?
Restorative Justice Online receives a large number of visitors each day. It is the highest ranked website on the topic, according to Google. But with the growth of restorative justice, we found that the old format and software would soon become impediments. We think that the temporary inconvenience of getting to know the new site will be well worth it to you.
Several factors influenced our decision to make this change.
First, we found that maintaining a static site made it increasingly difficult to keep up with the growing amount of information available on restorative justice. For this reason, we changed to content management software that provided more options for organizing and utilizing the data we have collected. This will enable us to update site sections more easily and quickly. We believe that this will provide better services to our visitors.
Second, visitors to the site regularly submit questions. As we noticed similarities in these questions, we began to explore how the site might be organized to make it easier for users to find answers to such questions. Several new sections were created based on these inquiries.
Third, the RJ Online research database has well over 5,000 citations and is growing daily. Since this wealth of information was only available via a search to the database, much of it was hidden from the casual site visitor. The new content management software allows us to use documents in the database in many of the new site features. The database is still searchable using the Research Tool, but its information is now easier to access.
Finally, RJ Online is a service to the restorative justice community provided by the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation at Prison Fellowship International (PFI). The redesign gave us an opportunity to adopt a look that is common to the collection of sites maintained by PFI.
The RJ Online redesign involved a great deal of work by a number of people. We are particularly grateful to two. Martin Howard, of Media 7, designed the new look of the site and provided insightful suggestions for developing the new site structure and typology. Tom Cameron, of Mooball.com, did the programming work that customized the content management software and offered creative solutions for some of the new more dynamic sections.
August 2005
