Released in 2017, the Senate's current website design offers the Senate's vast and varied audience a clean, modern, and responsive user experience. The homepage is designed to highlight the Senate’s most recent floor actions and provide quick access to Senate schedules and other popular links. Other enhancements to the site include a new banner, greater access to member sites, a central site search, printer friendly versions of all web pages, access to the floor webcast from all web pages, and a mobile friendly design.
In 2006 the Senate released a new design with easier access to senators' contact information and a site wide search box. During this time more of the Senate's content was made available to the public in machine-readable formats. Additionally, many special features were added to site along with live and archived streaming floor proceedings.
There were more than 40 million visitors to the Senate website this year--five times more than the estimated 8 million visitors in 2001. The number one goal of the Senate website will always be to provide the public with easy access to the home page for every senator. The site's secondary goal is to provide information about the Senate, a role that grows as technology improves. The Senate's fourth home page with the functionality of a powerful, behind-the-scenes content management system, allowed nontechnical subject experts to post information to the website, greatly increasing the amount of relevant information available to the public.
Senate floor and committee schedule information were provided when the 106th Congress convened and the third home page was launched on January 6, 1999. The site received a Federal Design Award, issued by the National Endowment for the Arts and the General Services Administration. The award recognized the site for "humaniz[ing] the venerable institution of the Senate by making its everyday activities and rich history readily accessible to the public."
As the World Wide Web has grown, so has the content and mission of Senate.gov. The pages of information are becoming catalogs and databases, but the mission to provide the public with accurate and timely information remains constant.
A virtual tour of the Capitol and Senate committee pages were new features of the second Senate home page, introduced in January 1997 A graphical interface and improved access to legislative data came with technologic advances. Information about institutional procedures, history, and statistical records were also new to the site.
