by Zack Schneider
Just as Obama’s people have used the web to bring great design to political campaigns, they have now brought great web design to the White House. Under no pressure, moments before Obama was sworn in, his people pushed the new whitehouse.gov live to the worldwide web. This moment was a huge leap forward for whitehouse.gov. And seemed like the perfect opportunity to take a look back at how far we have come in the last 13 years.
In 1996, the site was built with basic HTML and allowed the visitor to search for press releases and other presidential documents. It has a very clean look, similar to Google.
By 1997, whitehouse.gov scratched the search functionality for page filled with hyperlinks. These called out features of importance, such as news, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence.
Starting in 1998, things got cutting-edge with animated waving flags and an early Yahoo! look and feel. The site also became more of an information source for citizens with sections such as “Commonly Requested Federal Services,” “Citizens’ Handbook,” and breaking news. Not to mention “White House for Kids,” a section explaining the presidency to the youth of America.
As George W. Bush moved in (2001), the site began to show a bit more design and structure. The first navigation bar was put in place. There was also the first stab at accessibility, allowing users to skip the images for a full text based site.
After September 11, 2001, whitehouse.gov underwent a full redesign. The focus moved from education to safety. The attention to news feeds and threat levels increased within a day. It also occurred to the Bush administration that there might be some non-English speaking people visiting the site. So the next iteration was optimized for Spanish-speaking users. “Submit your questions to the Bush administration officials” and a newfangled RSS feed were also added. Other than that, the site remained relatively unchanged throughout 2006.
In 2007, the site underwent one last facelift while Bush was on his way out. It was yet another great leap forward. The site was more aesthetically pleasing, abandoning the portal look and feel. The navigation got major attention, as did the information architecture. The RSS feed was moved to a more prominent home on the top of the page, where podcasts were added. Design-wise, the site had come a very long way. But type treatment and formating could have used a bit more love.
Finally in 2009, Obama brought change to the White House and to whitehouse.gov as well. Macon Phillips, the newly appointed New Media Director for the Obama administration introduced the all new – and my personal favorite iteration of – whitehouse.gov.
With a tip of the hat to communication methods and the hottest trends in design, the new site offers RSS feeds, a blog, historic information, video, and it validates to XHTML 1.0. Boy, have we ever come along way, and it only took three presidents.
Let’s keep our eyes and laptops open to see what the executive branch has in store for us next.
If you’re interested in seeing all the versions of whitehouse.gov, just visit the Wayback Machine [http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://whitehouse.gov].
And be sure to leave a comment below and let me know what you think.
