Kennedy Space Center’s public home page has wrapped up an extensive redesign
that will provide a more visitor-friendly interface while making it easier
to locate information. The new site premiers today.

Visitor input was a driving factor in the look and functionality of the new
design. Since May 2000, the last time the site underwent a design change,
hundreds of comments were submitted via an online survey form. Patterns
began to emerge and KSC Web managers designed the new home page using these
suggestions as a guide. The result is an organized, compact page that serves
as a portal to other parts of the site. The primary links are arrayed around
a large round graphic that changes each time the page is reloaded. Upcoming
launch and landing information is provided at a glance in the upper left
corner. With about a third fewer links, there is more room for a larger font
and additional news content.

Information contained on the site was divided into several categories, all
of which have their own new portal pages created to match the new home page
design scheme. Like the home page, each of these new pages has a prominent
navigation bar, informative link descriptions and colorful graphics.

“We’ve had teams of subject-matter experts and Web developers working on
this new design and layout for more than nine months,” said Dennis
Armstrong, KSC’s public Web site manager. “Our new pages load quickly,
navigation is greatly improved, and we have added some great new content and
functionality. We appreciate the time that so many of our site visitors took
to tell us what they thought.”

KSC is also introducing a new multimedia gallery, through which the Center’s
extensive still photo archives can be searched by a wide variety of methods.
Web managers hope to add the capability to search for video and audio files
in the future.

The Kennedy Space Center Web site, launched in 1993, has traditionally
focused on KSC-specific information such as Space Shuttle missions, Space
Station processing, and expendable launch vehicles. Recently, however,
several new links to other online NASA resources have also been added. In
the first five months of 2001, the KSC Web site received over 200 million
hits and three million unique visitors. The KSC home page is located at
http://www.ksc.nasa.gov.