Wednesday, September 19, 2007

US Constitution.net

US Constitution.net website

Intended Audience
The website is intended as a resource for those who want information about or the text of the US Constitution and a variety of other historical documents pertaining to the United States. It is meant as a teaching tool as well - providing seperate areas for different age groups to explore the US Constitution as well as an area with suggestions for teachers who are teaching about it.

Usefulness of Content
The site contains a huge amount of information on the subject, including as mentioned before, the complete text of the Constitution and other documents, and teaching. It contains a set of Frequently Asked Questions (a FAQ), a historical timeline, articles on various contitutuional subjects, as well as a discussion area that seems fairly active. For someone wanting a collected source of information and discussion on the US Constitution and related documents (from the Magna Carta to Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech") the site is a treasure trove.

Consistency of design
The site design is very consistent. All black text, lots of text, on a light blue background. The same header bar with links to major portions of the site remains at the top in all but the "Kids" part of the site. It is hard to present this much text in an attractive way and it is obvious that this site is the creation of an individual and maintained by an individual. There is little in the way of design so much as organization. Sometimes the lists can be overwhelming - such as in the FAQ. There are 154 questions in a list. There are links embedded in the text to group the questions by categories or section of the Constitution. For a free site, that obviously pays for itself with some adds, they have minimized their impact by placing them all in a group at the bottom of each page.

Ease of navigation
The site is extremely easy to navigate. This is in part because it is so simple. It is limited in some cases by the simplicity (see above comments on the FAQ), where a more complex/interactive design would allow fewer clicks/user effort than opening a section then reading text about the section and clicking on an option. A lot of work has obviously been done to cross-link the documents so if two documents are somehow related historically, the discussion portion of that page will link to the other documents on the site.

The site is very deep in information and you can delve many pages in, however returning to the start is always simple by the uniform header on all pages.

Overall I think its a great resource for someone wanting to learn more about the US Constitution and history. It is a very simple site but that is not always bad. You never feel lost in it. Sure it could be prettier but slick presentation is not one of its goals. To be a resource is its main goal.

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