Change has come to America… and to the Whitehouse website too. It’s been, er, Web 2.0ized. Clean, frugal lines, punchy and concise content, navigatable – I like it. And of course, it has a blog. If this was a branding exercise, it’d definitely be on the ball (or “spot on”, as the Brits like to say).
Interestingly, the “main” navigation isn’t along sidebars, but at the top menu bar and bottom footer – keeping the body fairly open for content – divided mostly into a 3-column layout or 2-column layout (with a right sidebar). Even content on the whitehouse blog is kept terse. The first post gets an average readability score of 11.3, which is slightly above what a teenager would be comfortable reading. Firefox showed up multiple RSS feeds, which was a bit confusing, but the blog does have an RSS feed.
Comments are closed for now, but it would be interesting to see how the site will evolve.
Accessibility could be improved, I guess. There’s a link for “Accessibility” in super tiny font at the bottom. This opens a page that explains the government’s stand on accessibility, but it doesn’t have the common characteristics of a page designed for accessibility (large fonts, condensed text).
Navigational fonts could be a little bigger, at the bottom.