FCC Relaunches Website

The Federal Communications Commission launched a complete overhaul of the agency's web site - FCC.gov.

Now architected with a more intuitive user experience and the addition of Web 2.0 technologies, the new site improves and simplifies the FCC.gov experience for consumers, government, public safety agencies and the business community. This is the first major update to the site in ten years. The launch of the new site, available at beta.fcc.gov and linked off the existing home page, marks a significant step forward in FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's initiatives to continuously improve and modernize the way the public interacts with the Commission and the federal government.

Since Chairman Genachowski took office, the FCC has utilized Web 2.0 technologies - such as official agency blogs; multimedia and social media outlets; and opening the agency's processes via online participation platforms -- in reforming the agency. This process has generated hundreds of thousands of comments and interactions from across the country. The FCC's new media team will continue updating the beta FCC.gov site throughout 2011 with the help of public input through the public engagement and participation features in the new FCC.gov, as well as the agency's social media outlets.

The FCC's new web site was shaped by public feedback and sharpened through an ongoing conversation with users over the past several months and represents the FCC's first overhaul of its main web site in more than a decade. FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel oversaw the technical development and innovation strategies for the new FCC.gov. His vision for the new site drove the deployment of the site's cloud-hosted architecture, open source development, and embrace of leading design techniques drawn from leading consumer sites. The new FCC.gov is built using web services - a series of standards employed across many of the Web's most popular sites - which empowers citizen developers to build off the new FCC.gov in innovative ways. By building the new site using an open source, cloud-hosted, and scalable architecture, the FCC has leveraged modern tools as a long-term cost-saving strategy, lowering the barriers to future development and innovation among other public and private sector web sites.