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Really amazing graphist that make the obama campaign’s site too !
We reconize the graphic touch. Simply the best.

“The US government is a brand; the world’s oldest brand…”

World’s oldest brand? Which world?

Nice looking website, comparing to our governments website.

it is a very well designed site indeed!

“At the time of this screenshot, it matched the President’s skin tone rather well. One wonders if that is a coincidence.”
The brown used is the inverse of the light blue used… if you’re on a mac ctrl+alt+command+8 and you’ll get what I mean.
The new site is wick’
good article

How can it be the world oldest brand :S There has been loads of similar “brands” like the british monarchy and another other monarchy in the world that were around for hundereds of years before the US preseident existed. The history of the US is so short compared to the rest of the world.

I’d like to find that navigation somewhere as a jquery download

Beh beh beh…
Where is the blood effects?

Every thing looks fine…Nice use of typography.

DKumar M.

are they also move back to secure Lotus Notes email above outlook: http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200712/00002098001.html

I´m very dissapointed with the supossed “Spanish version” from the site. Chack it for yourself http://www.whitehouse.gov/spanish/. If you access, you will see a completly ENGLISH site (header, sidebar, footer, etc) with only 4 posts in spanish.

That´s not good ! You don´t go live with a suposed Spanish version till you don´t finnish it, at least the navigation, the menus, the context. I understand that thakes time to translate the content, but if you want to make a spanish site, focus on the only-spanish speakers, and not on the marketing-politics saying “Hey, we care about latins, we have spanish too” (lie)

I´ve sent an emai to whitehouse.gov, but i had no answer. Maybie this way i can have some feedback

Adios,
Francisco

Does anyone know what that gorgeous display serif is? The script looks like Snell Bold. Let’s hope that the rest of our government starts to rise to the challenge. Ever visited your local congressperson’s website? Or senator? Blech.

So this is the change Obama was talking about…

If only Georgia were used this beautifully everywhere. Lovely.

I like this kind of article, where a fantastic design is dissected and discussed. There’s not too many blogs doing this that I’ve found. These are valuable resources for beginning designers. Perhaps Smashing Magazine could find a few more examples to write about.

Great work, thanks!

Nicely written article about a very nicely designed site. Its good for the detailed dissection of the site, it gives a good overview of what should be done and what should be avoided.

Perhaps do a few more site reviews like this.

Cheers :)

Ha ha. This site uses tables. Cheaply made.

The new site is really good. First goverment related site ever i subscribed. And i’m not even from the U.S. …

A more concise assessment would point out that the new website is an adaptation of Obama’s campaign branding. Essentially it fuses Obama’s strong-colored, graphic heavy, modern website with the traditional, light and boring whitehouse.gov design.

We hope to see more changes than those on the website.

I see that the “world’s oldest brand” had been stroked-through =) It is only 500 years ago America was discovered, and then it took alot of time to get it to be a state and to develop a “brand”. The beer i am drinking ( Leffe ) has more history in it than USA. But, ok, Whitehouse changed site. It’s OK i guess.

hey! it’s so fantastic amazing design! I’m an Iranian- don’t be afraid! I’m not a terrorist!- and I believe in the change, in Barack Obama! ;-)

Lovely re-design – loving the blue and brown and grateful to Jon (February 1st, 2009, 4:32 am) for the shortcut i wasn’t aware of.

@Jbcarey

Every country is great for its own reasons. One thing doesn’t negate something else necessarily.

@Coen

You’re misconstruing what I’m trying to say. Regardless if it’s the oldest or not (which it is not), it’s one of the biggest brands in the world. Period. But way to get all butthurt about it.

Anyway, more about design and whatnot.

http://www.JeremyBuff.org is a political blog based on wordpress that mirrors WhiteHouse.org. Although not an exact replica, it’s a lot like WhiteHouse.org. The site says it’s not complete yet, but you should check it out.

Looks real nice

Great design. Should come with some color themes. Definitely for me the red color theme is suitable right now.

Coen, you lost all your credibility by being the only person on this page to drop the f-word. Crude and offensive language is hardly the way to present an argument.

Dan, I think it has more to do with the close link between capitalism and democracy than with the quality of any language. Here in Australia it is government policy to use proprietary technologies only. A bit of a shame for us open-source developers.

Katie, thanks for a great article. I understand that your controversial first sentence might have been a sly joke at the way candidates “prostitute” themselves (said to be the world’s oldest profession). However it was obviously poorly worded and should be removed, not scratched out. But don’t take it personally, we all love your article ;)

castrodesign, this is the government, it was probably millions of dollars, with funds earmarked for bridges, toilets, and stepping stones. It probably cost more than me or you will make in our lifetimes, all at the expense of the taxpayer.

Interestingly, some bits and pieces of the old site seem to be retained on http://z22.whitehouse.gov/

they have done a nice job with the redesign…

My first gut reaction was: so how much did Sony pay for its logo on the first feature photo on the first page of the site :)

Nice site, though, and thanks for this informative article!

Well, i’d say the design is fresh. Won’t say great but clean for sure. As for the price of the website, somebody surely got rich – whatever happened to the cost consciousness in this time of recession. ‘Oldest brand’ – well, now that’s something ‘New’.

Ahh, a good call. I always wondered about that ridiculous old whitehouse.gov site and if it was ever going to get .. “upgraded”.

A great bit of those CSS validation errors come from custom Mozilla CSS.

Let’s not read the results from W3C’s validator as gospel. The site validates. The validator is out of date. (For example, it doesn’t know anything about HTML 5 elements.)

@ Anish, comment 62:

This site was made during the transition period. Do you really expect that Obama’s team should have been making economic changes before he became President? Let’s get real here.

nvm

Belated author commentary >> I believe the intent was not that US government was the oldest, rather that Government, in all it’s forms is. Clearly I am full of fail.

Beretta Firearms is the oldest brand in the world, as it was created in 1526.

Good redesign. Very clean and up to date. I specifically like the addition of the deeper blue and the red. I also like the idea of the carousel but I have to agree with another commenter that it’s too long before the image changes. People’s attention for websites is getting shorter and shorter and I doubt the average user sticks around on the front page long enough to know that it changes on it’s own.

I like good design. I like discussing design. Obviously a good portion of the commenters here don’t. Do all of us real designers a favor, keep your political hate-mongering on your favorite political blog and let the intelligent ones on this site use if for what it’s for… DESIGN. If I were a customer, I wouldn’t hire a single one of you to redesign my dog house let alone my website, because it’s obvious that design isn’t anything you care about, specifically the guy who felt the need to be the only one in a list of over 70 comments to drop the f-bomb. Utterly unprofessional and childish, you should be ashamed of yourself and IP banned from this site.

To Rob who posted comment number 30. The fact that your president is in our headlines daily is nothing to be smiling about mate.

Pretty good article thanks guys. Is this some kind of ground-breaking design?

I’m glad that you covered the new website. I really love it. I would like to add that the xHTML validated on the day of the inauguration (not the CSS, though), but there are now 3 errors (though small ones– probably typos).

As for the content, the historical content on the White House, past presidents, etc. look much more inviting the way they are laid out now. I also love the fact that the contact form no longer has you choose from a drop-down menu whether your comment is positive or negative.

I really like the new design…Blue is my favorite color :)
They updated the robots.txt too…It’s slimmer now.

Also check out this in depth analysis on the use of jQuery in the new whitehouse.org website: http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/02/jquery-on-whitehousegov-a-closer-look/

I’m not from US, hence I don’t know what the previous website looked like. Can anybody give a link to or post a screenshot of the previous design? So we can compare side by side. Thanks :) It’s a nice design though, I like it!

Curious to note a compare/contrast of past whitehouse.gov websites.

This one was interesting: The Witehouse — Bill Clinton. Why was there a request to confirm that I am over 18?

LOL

Humans have been branding one way or another since humans decided to paint themselves certain ways to instill fear in enemies.

It was taken further by royalty, and was seen later on shields. As long as there has been civilization, there has been branding.

I came across this site yesterday. Looks nice and clean!

Does anyone know which company did the revamp?

It would be nice to see full screen side by side comparisons. I hate the logo right in the middle of the page on the new site. It seems to push down the whole page. What little we see of the last site the logo treatment looks better, more rich and textured while the new site is mimimal more “Wal-mart-ish” Both sites look fine for what they are. But it is really hard to compare the sites with out a full screen side by side comparison.

Thank you for the useful technical comments. I gathered several helpful points: 1) the name of the designer, 2) a reminder to use invert color for contrast (I forget too often), and 3) a note about the CSS3 opacity.

I had noticed the transparency on the drop down nav links on the site the day it launched — a technique I’d never seen live. Is that the opacity error? If so, I’d say err on!

Interesting to hear ExpressionEngine comments too. Blue State Digital did the campaign site.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I was in the process of completing a job application at change.gov. However since 1/16/09 I have not been able to reach my file (email address as above) . I have repeated addressed different site trying to locate the new link and complete my application. Is this some thing the transition team, my Congressman, or better yet, you can help with.

Many thanks

Peter B

Hmm, americaneagle.com? Sounds a bit fishy to me.

What type of navigation is used on the masthead nav? I know it’s jquery but how do you do this?