Eleven years may not sound like a long time. But if you’re a website, it’s an eternity. CBO’s site has had a few coats of paint and a couple of replacement parts added over the years, but under the hood it was starting to look like…well, like an 11-year-old website. And so our old site has headed off to a well-deserved retirement.
Today we’re excited to introduce a brand new cbo.gov, our platform for making available to the Congress (and the public) CBO’s estimates and other analyses of budgetary and economic issues. Some of the changes are pretty obvious, but others you might not notice on first glance:
A revamped topics section. All our work will now be categorized by topic. That means no more going to both the publications section and the cost estimates section to find all of our work on a single subject. Plus, we've added a few new topics (and many more are on the way in the coming weeks and months).
A better search function. In the next few days, the search function will be significantly improved compared with the previous version. You’ll be able to search all of our reports, cost estimates, and blog posts from the search bar at the top of every page. Your search results will be returned by relevance instead of date, and there will be several new filters to help you narrow your searches.
A brand-new feature: My CBO. Are you a regular CBO user? Do you have particular subjects you like to track? The My CBO feature allows you to save your favorite topics to your own profile so that you can easily track the work that’s most important to you right from your very own page. You can sign up using your preferred OpenID account—no new passwords to remember!
Easy to share our content. Now you can e-mail our content, post it to your favorite social networking site, or even print it to read later, all from a single button. To share our work with a friend, you can like us on Facebook, tweet a link to your favorite article, or just click the Share button at the top of any report, cost estimate, or blog post.
New e-mails and RSS feeds. Do you like reading CBO through your favorite feed reader? Now you can have just one feed for all our content. If you are currently receiving cbo.gov content through an RSS feed, you’ll need to update your links. If you’re currently subscribed to our e-mail alerts, you’ll get them just like you did before. (You may need to add "feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com" to your email white lists). Not subscribed? You can do that for free here.
Launching a new website doesn’t mean that our improvements are complete. It just makes future improvements a little easier to accomplish. So if there are improvements you’d like to see, we’d love to hear from you; just drop us a line at webmaster@cbo.gov.