Change (dot gov)
January 20th, 2009 Chris
Tags: design, politics, tech | 1 Comment »
Promptly at 12pm, Obama’s media team launched the redesigned whitehouse.gov. Some thoughts:
- As with all of Obama’s sites, through the primaries and the transition, the design is beautiful, clean, and usable.
- It’s even XHTML compliant!
- The site has a blog and links to a twitter account
- It uses Creative Commons for copyright!
Perhaps most emblematic of a new, open government, though, is the site’s robots.txt file. For the uninitiated, a robots.txt file tells search engines like Google what they’re allowed to index. Things that aren’t indexed aren’t searchable. The old whitehouse.gov had a robots.txt totalling over 2400 lines, meaning that lots of stuff on the site was essentially hidden, or at least a pain in the ass to find. Obama’s site has just one exclusion, which is a directory used for scripts (useless information for search engines anyway).
Here’s to a new day in the US of A.
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 0 people and commented on 0 times 
February 14th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Yes, I noticed the change that day as I had my fifth graders doing an internet scavenger hunt about the Presidency and the Oval Office. In the morning all of my links worked fine but immediately after the inauguration I had to scramble to find the new links and get them changed on my web page so that my students could get the info they needed.