Pine Tree Legal Assistance was the second legal services program in the country to have
a website, and the first to make client education and self-help materials available over
the internet. From April 1996 until Novmeber 2002 we added lots of features and information,
but the design stayed pretty much the same. You can look at some early versions of the Pine
Tree website (or any other website) by using the Wayback
Machine of the Internet Archive
In November 2002, after several months of work, we completed a redesign of the website.
We think it looks a lot better, and is easier to get around in. The new site is built on
the Zope open source web development platform. Pine Tree is proud
to be part of the growing open source movement in the legal services community. Although we've
learned a lot, and have been able to do much of the work on the new site ourselves, we still
needed to call on our friends at Kaivo Software for programming
advice. For anyone who needs web development or programming work, we recommend them highly.
The art work on our site was done for us by Annie Poole of Brooksville, Maine. Annie not only
painted the watercolors for us, but helped us design a color scheme for the entire site to
go with the paintings. We are very grateful to Annie for her work. To keep the graphics
from slowing our site down, the paintings were "optimized" for presentation on the web.
That is, the number of colors and shades was greatly reduced without detracting too much
from the quality of the pictures.
If you have concerns about privacy, please read our
privacy policy.
The bottom line is we don't keep any personal information about you unless you send it
to us in an email or in a form. We don't share information about you with anyone unless
you ask us to. We do keep statistics about how many people use our site and visit
different pages.
The most frequently visited parts of our website are the client education (legal help)
pages, the links pages, and the interactive forms. The interactive forms were created
with the help of two small grants from the Maine Bar Foundation
and the Maine Community Foundation.
We have done our best to make our website comply with the requirements of Section 508
of The Rehabilitation Act and the recommendations of the
Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. It is important to
us that our site be used as effectively by people with disabilities as by those without.
We have tested the site extensively using the Watchfire "Bobby" software and corrected
those pages where problems were found. We aren't experts on these issues, though, and
appreciate comments if the website creates problems for people with disabilities.
We welcome comments from anyone about how our site is designed and presented. If you have
ideas for improvement, please let us know. Use the feedback link below. Thank you.
