Blackstone Chambers, the UK's leading human rights set, has launched an innovative new website developed for the chambers by Blueprint Software.

The site, www.blackstonechambers.com, claims to be the first live implementation of its kind by a UK barristers' chambers and requires the lawyers and their support staff to maintain and manage dynamic web content.

Blueprint developed a Microsoft-based system using Active Server Pages in combination with an Access database to link the home pages of individual barristers with their field specialisations, cases, papers, events and news items.

An important technical issue for Blackstone – a chambers with 62 practitioners and 22 administrative staff – was that the system should be capable of managing the vast quantity of archive information so that viewers do not have to wait for thousands of items to load into a new page each time.

The key to this lies with the site's administration, which allows administrators to select certain items to display on the main page, while the remaining ones are archived for retrieval via a search facility.

According to Blueprint, support staff with no database skills can easily perform tasks such as adding new members, news items, cases, papers and events. The supplier also claims that there is no need to install Access on the administrators' machines and that there is no lengthy upload process involved.

The administration site also includes a section that displays all online enquiries submitted by visitors to the main website.

Julia Hornor, practice manager at Blackstone Chambers, said a major requirement was to allow the public to move easily between different areas of the website as their research took them to greater levels of detail.

She said: "For example, someone interested in company law should be able to drill down through a series of dynamic links to look up barristers specialising in the field and even examine the cases each has been involved in. Another requirement was that it should be simple enough for our non-technical staff to update and administer."