This is the seventh major redesign of Senator Kennedy's web site. During this design process we collected comments submitted to the webmaster@kennedy.senate.gov e-mail address. We also performed several major audits of the official web sites on “The Hill” and established a best practices document which we referred to throughout the design process. As always, we also followed the advice of Congressional Management Foundation.
Our main requirement for this new design was to improve the delivery of information and service to constituents. To this end, we have scaled back on the amount of information on each page and paid a great deal of attention to the site map design. In response to constituent feedback, we have added more places for users to respond to stories, more feedback on what we are hearing from constituents, and several “self service” modules."
The purpose of all of this integrated information is to provide convenience, save the user time, and create a sense of community. Each page offers constituents a mix of streaming content, links and original content produced by the office and by the Senate community – a "portal" into the world of information about the political process. We will be actively encouraging your feedback and updating features on the site to make this the best web experience possible.
Credits
This site was designed by the office of Senator Edward M Kennedy in cooperation with CreativEngine. If you experience any functional problems with the web site or if you have any suggestions with how we can make your visit to our page better, please contact the webmaster.
Technology
The seventh version of Senator Kennedy's web site utilizes a great deal of leading edge technology. For a full list and description of the technologies used keep reading.
XHTML is an XML based implementation of the standard HTML mark-up language. XHTML defines the content that appears on the page. By treating the content of the site as structured XML data it enables the content to be delivered in various display mediums such as cell phones and hand held computers. Properly structured XHTML also provides a better experience for those users with disabilities who rely on technology like screen readers. We have made every effort to make sure that the underlying structure of the site is XML compliant.
Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, compliment HTML or XHTML by defining how the content should look. Using CSS to control the visual appearance of the site allows for rapid updating and faster downloads. This site uses CSS 2.1
Section 508 Compliance requires that a site be accessible to visitors with disabilities. We have made every effort to ensure this site is accessible to all users, if you should encounter a problem please contact us.
Flash 8 offers significant benefit to users with increased performance times, better video support and much improved text rendering for increased legibility. You can see an example of this improved text legibility on the home page of this site if you have Flash 8 installed. For those users still using an older version of Flash the text and content will default to the older version of Flash. For those users who choose not to have Flash we have standard XHTML content.
Asynchronous JAvascript and XML allows for content on the site to be updated without having to refresh the browser window by making javascript calls to a database and returning the data as XML nodes. A good example of this can be seen on the home page of this site in the "Issue Browser" section. AJAX is relatively new and may not support all browsers.
The Senate is standardized on ColdFusionMX7 and Microsoft's SQL Server. This version of the site utilizes new features in MX7 to provide graphical charts of constituent feedback. We also used new XML features for preparing form data collected on the site for the office's Constituent Management System.