Evan Genest's Learning Log

I keep notes here. Most of these are related to travel, work, or books.

Website of Representative Slotkin

web analyticsdrupal

The website for Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin is at https://slotkin.house.gov. The following is what I learned by looking at its web design.

UX

The Elissa Slotkin site has a clean design. It seems aware that a third of its users are older folks.

I have an octagenarian friend, so I will investigate the site's senior-friendliness by watching her navigate it this week when she tunes in to the upcoming livestream at http://slotkin.house.gov/live

Design and CSS

The use of Red and Blue are very balanced. This is not an blue heavy Squad or E Warren site: keeping the door open to Red and Blue folks.

Data Odometer Spinner

I don't know what this element is properly termed. It's a banner 2/3 of the way down many popular pages that shows animated loading numbers for how succesful the business is. For this page, it animates three numbers:

136,000
Responses to Emails, Letters and Calls
2,593
Constituent Cases Closed
$1,637,000
Dollars Returned to Constituents

Technology used by the site

According to Built With, the following things are in the stack of the Slotkin site.

Varnish

Varnish is a server, specialized in caching, maybe for video streaming especially?

2000 of the top 10000 sites use a Varnish server (says Built With).

The name Varnish comes from when the instigator of Varnish spent a long time staring at an art-poster with the word "Vernissage" and ended up checking it in a dictionary, which gives the following three meanings of the word... (https://varnish-cache.org/intro/)

Drupal

This continues my observation that there is always a job for you in government web development if you keep up with Drupal.

The site is on an up to date Drupal 9 (yay!).

In theming I see there is a WooTheme style on the FlexSlider.

Javascript

Advertising

Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) (a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based ad selection).

It is an ethical advertising project, maybe like DuckDuckGo? The Readme at Github is helpful.

The total number of users of FLoC plummeted from 50,000 to 20,000 in August, according to the graph at BuiltWith.

Hosting

Nexcess
And DNS from Azure maybe

Mapping by ArcGIS

This seems like a boss-move. De-google your web pages everybody!

Web Analytics

Oh. The Web Analytics is Google Tag Manager.