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.