Very recently redesigned, the Michigan State University College of Law website is clean cut and well organized, especially for a college website. Many college websites I have seen just cannot seem to get it right in any respect. The site really brings everything good from the main MSU website and adds just the right amount of style for a quality redesign.

The best part of this page how the design doesn’t impact the content like you’d think it might. Take a look at the page with no styling; the basic organization is the same. I believe it was Andy Clarke in his book Transcending CSS who noted that as designers we should organize raw and styled content in the same structure. Once you see the unstyled page, you’ll understand exactly what I mean. Everything is in the same order that you would see while looking at the page fulled styled.

The sub-pages look just as good as the homepage. The sidebar allows for a variety of content while the main column generally mimicks the look and feel of the homepage. It helps to make visitors more comfortable and less prone to taking a step away from the site. “Woah, this looks different…” is not the kind of reaction you want from visitors. A better one is “Ah, good info. Hey, what’s that? Coooool…”.

The MSU Law site is well organized, taking a relatively aged and ordinary design from the MSU homepage and really making something of it. The sub-pages are just designed just as well, offering just a few more juicy design cues to make the right content pop. It also helps to give readers the most important information above the fold with all the secondary stuff nicely laid out just a scroll away. Perhaps the best feature of this site is the ability of the design to maintain structure and organization in a variety of environments (i.e., lack of styling on most mobile phones and older browsers).

Take a look around and let us know what you think.