Ready.gov: Preparing America in Under Six Weeks
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security requested a website as the central component of their nationwide citizen preparedness campaign, "Don't be Afraid, Be Ready," which encouraged Americans to prepare themselves and their homes in the event of a terrorist attack.
The website was to visually communicate and educate a wide spectrum of visitors on the actions that one needed to take in case of a terrorism attack.
Additionally, the site was to:
Communicate the campaign's website in a clear and effective manner that could be understood by every man, woman, and child in the US, including those with disabilities
Offer easy access to the majority of computers in use today. Special detail had to be given to CPU, OS, and Internet connection speed
Contain an infrastructure that could withstand a tremendous amount of traffic while being immune to cyber attacks, hackers, and site defacement
Serve as the chief resource for citizen preparedness information on the web
Ensure content accessibility using scalable information architecture to organize large amounts of information
Support a user-centered and intuitive navigation system to make the site accessible to as many users as possible
The time-sensitive project was completed in six weeks. To date, Ready.gov has had over 24 million visits and over 15.9 million unique visitors. Ready.gov received 54 million hits and 3.4 million visitors in the first 24 hours. The site never once faltered.
Additionally:
The site was written up in a dozen publications, including a special feature in the New York Times focusing on the original graphics Ruder Finn created for the site
Jacob Neilson, co-founder of Norman Neilson Associates (nngroup.com), described Ready.gov as "a great example of a government U.S. Government Site that is highly usable and that meets, and in some cases exceeds, 508 standards."
I Can! Online (ican.com), the leading disability online community, named Ready.gov its Web Site of the Week