GOP Thoughts On Obama's New Web Site
Former Republican National Committee Web whiz Patrick Ruffini thinks President Barack Obama's new WhiteHouse.gov is pretty but he was expecting something "a bit more majestic." The political consultant wrote on his EngageDC blog that: "Obama's design efforts have gotten progressively more workmanlike since the campaign site was refreshed with ethereal, cloud-like design in early 2008. I was expecting a return to something more like that now that Obama actually is the president, rather than pretending to be the president with fake seals and federal imagery."
Other thoughts from Ruffini:
▪ The large, rotating headline feature area to drive key messages was long overdue on a White House site, and the implementation is superb.
▪ A departure from previous Obama sites, WhiteHouse.gov is built in Microsoft's proprietary .NET framework, something that is sure to cause no small degree of consternation among the President's devotees in the open source community.
▪ I am surprised that the Obama team is not doing more to collect e-mail addresses, sticking with the traditional upper right hand placement of the e-mail signup box but little else.
▪ The design seems to be influenced by Andy Rutledge's 2006 critique and suggested alternative, which consisted mostly of making the homepage a glorified sitemap. The current homepage isn't quite that bad, though the extended footer is evocative of it.
David Almacy, who left his post as White House Internet director for former President Bush to join the public relations firm Waggener Edstrom, declined to opine: "Think I am going to wait and see where they go with it. It's only day two," he said in an e-mail.
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