Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov – When will it come to your Website?
Image: Brick Obama by ~emeph
Immediately after Barack Obama has been sworn in as the new president of the United States
the Whitehouse.gov website has been relaunched.
Some of the most important aspects of this change are:
- It has a blog
- It’s valid “XHTML 1.0 Transitional”
- It’s robots.txt file is one line long
- It uses the by now industry standard jQuery JavaScript library
- It has a Spanish version
- It focuses on public good, just read the notice on gifts below the contact form
Besides that we recognize some common sense best practices like
- Very content rich
- Clean URLs and directory structure “/agenda/civil_rights/”
- user and search engine optimized HTML titles like “civil rights”
Of course there are some drawbacks here too
- Some too small font sizes, especially in the menu at the bottom
- The homepage is more than 1 megabyte in size, mostly due to scripts and images
- No direct social media connection
- No 301 URL redirection of old documents, they resulted in a 404 not found error
Nonetheless we clearly recognize that change has come to WhiteHouse.gov, when will it come to your website?
Technology is at the forefront of change, use it accordingly, in a SEO 2.0 manner like Obama does, or get left behind.
Last updated: January 30th, 2017. Due to recent political events I had to remove all outgoing links to the White House website.
Read More Recent Posts:
SEO is Alive! Let’s Celebrate!
Social SEO Metrics to Embrace in 2024 Instead of Website Traffic
The 10 Most Obvious Benefits of X-Twitter for Business
Social Media Management: How to Fix Mistakes Business People Make
Blogging Tools You Probably Aren’t Using to Scale Your Blog
How Embedding YouTube Videos on Your Blog Backfires
The new website is preety good, but I wonder why they didn’t make it XHTML Strict valid.
Yeah, the markup passes validation which is a good thing, but it’s still pretty bad markup. It suffers from divitus and terrible class names.
So valid? yes. Semantic? not so much.
But it is a nice looking and usable site. I’m hoping it will be that way for the next 8 years ;)
There’s numerous CSS errors, but other than that it’s a nice design!
Barack, his team, and what he’s doing is inspiring in so many ways.
I wouldn´t think a 1-line robots.txt is necessarily a good thing, but I guess that´s not really the point here.
Amazing that somebody thought about changing those kind of things…
what is the meaning behind the picture?
Is no direct social media connection summarily a bad thing?
Yes, social media is a must by now, just read this:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2009/tc20090218_335887.htm
Agree with onreaect, social media has truly become a must in the new world of marketing and PR.