Welcome to Völkerrechtsblog 3.0! We are very happy to introduce you to our completely redesigned and modernized website. Six years into its existence, Völkerrechtsblog receives a new logo and design that has been remodelled to make it more modern, accessible and easier to navigate.
Some of you might remember our early days – Völkerrechtsblog went online in 2014 with a basic wordpress page created by a group of PhD students with the idea to use the opportunities and spaces the internet offers for international legal scholarship. Ever since, Völkerrechtsblog has been growing and expanding. Our readership almost tripled in the last years, and our statistics show that there is almost no country in the world where Völkerrechtsblog is not read. We adjusted the blog to those changing circumstances several times; in 2016, we relaunched the blog for the first time with the support of our partners and sponsors; thanks to the funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), Völkerrechtsblog now receives a fully professional make-over.
What is new?
You will immediately see how different our site looks. The simple new design gives it a much fresher and more contemporary look. The frontpage is clean and contains some new information, including about the most-read articles of the last weeks. The new frontend does not only present our recent articles, it also gives an overview about our recent symposia and other published content. Furthermore, we aim to make the experience more personal for you, our readers, by introducing the members of our editorial team step-by-step on the frontpage.
But not only that – the new site also includes some new features. Some of them are small, like the new “print” function next to each article which makes it easier to download and save posts or the improved editorial team section. Others are more substantial, like our new media section. One of the advantages of blogs is that they can keep with time, and we therefore decided to give more importance to multimedia content, with a section dedicated to videos and podcasts. Even though we took this decision already last summer, the Corona year 2020 proved that we were right with this decision. Despite the fact that the media-section is still a little empty right now, you can be thrilled about what the near future will bring!
Of particular importance to us is also the improved search function. Our archive, which gives the blog a more library-like feeling, is supposed to make it easier to navigate through posts and topics. This should not only help our readers to use the blog better for their research, it also keeps the older articles of our authors present. The approach also connects with the overall idea to give our authors more visibility – not least with the new authors’ pictures and the overview of all authors and the articles they published on our blog.
Finally, the engine room of our blog has been remodelled, too. The technical details of our publication process have been streamlined and simplified, meaning that we have more time for our editorial work and the development of new ideas and projects. Apart from that, we are taking your privacy even more serious now: no personal data is collected or transferred to any external actor without your explicit consent.
Our core remains the same!
But in many ways, the new site sticks to what we consider to be our core identity. Our aim is and remains to provide a platform for exchange and discussion for the international legal community. Besides publishing articles, we will keep on advertising job offers, international law events and calls for papers (a separate post on our new service section will go online this afternoon).
Equally importantly, all content on Völkerrechtsblog is and will remain Open Access. The importance we give to the principle of open knowledge is not least reflected in the blue colour very present on our new page, reminiscing the colour used for hyperlinks since the early days of the Internet. This is not only to remind our visitors that, despite experimenting with new things, we always want to stick to our founding ideal: making knowledge accessible and free for everyone.
Join the debate!
We hope you enjoy our new website and we welcome your feedback via the comment function below or via e-mail, as we will keep on improving the new site. Last but definitely not least, Völkerrechtsblog continues to live through the engagement of the international legal community and the character of open discourse. As always, we therefore invite you to engage in discussions and to hand in your contributions at the Völkerrechtsblog.
Do you have any suggestions, comments or critique for us? Please tell us! We are only one e-mail away: editorial-team@voelkerrechtsblog.org.
