New Year, New Look! IJ’s Website Redesign Makes Big Improvements

Each year, IJ’s website—ij.org—receives millions of visitors seeking to find out about our cases, read our research, and support IJ’s mission. Our website is a key tool in litigating our cases in the court of public opinion and serves as an archive of IJ’s 30 years of litigating for liberty.  

This summer, for the first time in seven years, we embarked on the process of updating IJ’s website. To help the site continue to grow, our goal was to modernize the site, in terms of both how it looks and the underlying technology it uses. To do that, we partnered with a web development firm and also brought on a full-time web developer, Rima Gerhard. 

In redesigning the website, we wanted to do a better job of giving first-time visitors a sense of what IJ is and what we do. We also wanted to improve the site’s look and feel on mobile phones, which now account for almost half of our visitors. The new site incorporates a much more sophisticated system for finding and contacting potential clients, a Google-powered search function, and a streamlined online donation system.  

You can now find a timeline of IJ’s first 30 years and a concise list of some of our major achievements on the About Us page, as well as landing pages for our recently launched initiatives, like IJ’s Project on the Fourth Amendment.  

After six months of designing, programming, organizing, and writing, we launched the new site in January.  

Here are a few statistics about ij.org: 

• The site received 2 million page views in 2021.
• There are 431 pages on the site, 2,018 press releases, 1,313 Liberty & Law articles, 659 report pages, and 600 client profiles. 
• The site has 1,631,393 pieces of “metadata”—small pieces of information about our cases and reports, like the date we filed a case or a report datapoint. 
• The site hosts 3,430 PDFs and 10,346 photos. 
• There are 13,157,529 words stored on the website. 
• The codebase includes more than 60,000 lines of code. 

We hope you’ll visit ij.org and see for yourself how the new site looks and feels!

J. Justin Wilson is IJ’s senior director of communications.