There is a great new guy in the White House and he’s got a brand new website as well. The official whitehouse.gov had a major overhaul and the result is quite nice.

They use ASP.NET 2.0, but the markup almost validates. The site also has a blog function, RSS feeds and almost 2400 lines in the robots.txt file. And here is the Twitter feed.

Other nice details: 3rd party content is Creative Commons licensed. It use GZIP compression to improve performance. Actual JQuery usage. It even uses CSS sprites, the classic technique by Dave Shea.

The White House The White House in Washington D.C.

On the downside is use of ViewState, lots of whitespace and HTML comments. There is also a handful of hidden links in there, providing link-back points for the site developers.

The end result is not flawless in any way, but still a big improvement to the old site.

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Posted in category Web standards.

7 comments

  • avatar
    mandus
    22 Jan, 2009
    I was expecting a political analysis, but this was quite a fresh take on the whole matter. :D
  • avatar
    Reine
    22 Jan, 2009
    Hehe, why discuss politics when you can discuss web standards? :)
  • avatar
    Fredrik
    25 Jan, 2009
    It would've been even more interesting is they'd chosen an open development platform instead of ASP.NET, but I guess you can't get everything. :)
  • avatar
    Reine
    25 Jan, 2009
    Yeah, the choice of ASP.NET feels a bit Bush-esque. :)
  • avatar
    Fredrik
    30 Jan, 2009
    It's teh d4rk side! O_o
  • avatar
    Drupal
    05 Jan, 2010
    it runs on Drupal
  • avatar
    Reine
    05 Jan, 2010
    Yes, they switched from ASP.NET to Drupal in October 2009, ten months after I wrote the entry.

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