WhiteHouse.gov Redesign

WhiteHouse.gov just got a facelift, so let's take a quick look at the new homepage.

Design: I'm not a fan. It's too boxy, too monochromatic, and uses whitespace really poorly. For the most part, the text is too small, except for the second box in the center column where it is inexplicably larger. Overall, the design comes across as cramped and amateurish.

Features: According to White House website boss David Almacy, there's nothing new to see here. The changes that were made were intended, among other things, to highlight the AV and RSS features. These sections, however, don't seem to have made it into the main navigation yet. Video and photos aren't linked from most of the interior pages; podcasts and RSS are linked from every page, but only in a jumble of extra stuff next to the search box. There is a nice integration of audio and video with the text-based stories in some of the section archives, but too often, a video or audio link lands you on a blank page with an embedded player — not the nicest presentation. And the RSS feeds are oddly organized.

Standards: Viewing the HTML source, it's like a trip back to 1999 — tables, tables, everywhere. The HTML doesn't validate, either — a whopping 127 errors! Lots of careless closing tag problems, but lots of other errors that are reflective of amateur hour: two title tags in the head; ids being reused, etc. I don't think the developers bothered to validate the HTML, but given their apparent skill level, they really should have.

The markup is littered with inline styles combined with 22 1/2 sets of font tags (yup, an end tag is missing). There is also an external style sheet with doesn't validate (although the error is a simple typo). The style declarations themselves don't seem to have a standard unit of measure — px mixed with em mixed with font-size keywords — which make them very confusing.

Conclusion: The whitehouse.gov team really should have taken some extra time to get more of this stuff right. There is certainly potential here. There are some nice design elements on some of the interior pages, and this site has multimedia content too burn. But it's handicapped by spaghetti code and the lack of a unifying aesthetic vision. These are common problems with large sites, to be sure — but they are solvable with effort. So I wonder — why aren't they being solved here?