A preview of the new U.S. House of Representatives web site is now available You can access the preview at: preview.house.gov.
According to the developers the new site is “more powerful” and easier to navigate when compared to what will soon become the “old” version of House.gov.
One change that is quite noticeable is direct access from the homepage to five public disclosure databases:
When you run a search, the preview of House.gov shows that search results continue to be powered by Google. An Advanced Search page also remains available. Design wise, search results page are much cleaner and crisper but we do wish that result snippets were a bit longer. Also, direct linking to a search results pages are still not available.
The Sunlight Foundation Labs blog has an in-depth look at Preview.house.gov.
For example:
The educational section is actually pretty impressive. The old House.gov mostly outsourced that job to THOMAS and other websites, aside from one long page about the legislative process. The new website takes the time to go over many more aspects of the House, but breaks it out effectively so that a long page of text is never dropped onto the reader.
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