The Final State of the Union
This is historical material “frozen in time”. The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.
Summary:
We took a number of steps to improve the blog experience this week. Find out what they were and tell us what you think should be next.
I remember when the Obama administration’s version of WhiteHouse.gov first launched in 2009. I didn’t work here at the time, but I — like so many others — visited theWhite House website to 1. See what all the fuss was about; and 2. See how the Obama administration had decided to put its own unique stamp on the web presence of the presidency. The site was beautiful and sleek, formal and inspirational — and it got accolades as a result.
We’ve made a lot of improvements since then — to the blog and elsewhere across the site — but we never consider it “done.”
There’s been real progress in this administration towards a more transparent, attentive, and responsive government for the American people — and we think the White House brand and web platforms should be emblematic of that progress. The only way to accomplish that is to be nimble and continue improving up until the end.
There are obvious external factors pushing us toward change, as well. The sources and means by which folks get information, both as consumers and as citizens, are constantly evolving — we’ve got to keep up and meet people where they are.
Today, we released a brand-new version of the White House blog that’s reflective of those efforts. Here’s what that looks like.
A new way of visualizing a given day at the White House.
For some time now, we’ve served you the President’s schedule and the Vice President’s schedule on WhiteHouse.gov a daily basis, but we realized we weren’t actually making it truly useful.
How embarrassing: We were being transparent by laying out the events of the President’s day, but it was both difficult to find and a dead-end.
Whether you’re visiting WhiteHouse.gov looking for a specific piece of content, following a link from another site back to our platform, or you’re simply browsing — we want you to have a great experience that both gives you what you were looking for and introduces something you didn’t know was there. That’s how interacting with your government should be.
So what did we change?
We integrated the daily schedule into a streamlined daily feed, housed alongside the rest of the day’s relevant content.
Now, when you visit the schedule, you’ll get additional context for the day’s events — timely content that will make your visit fruitful.
We gave you more options on how to browse.
You can quickly skim through the daily schedules.
You can scroll through the feed.
Or, you can subscribe to the schedule feeds to view them from wherever you’d like.
We’re providing more direct links to relevant content.
Say goodbye to “pinch and zoom.”
Have you had to pinch and zoom to read our content on your mobile devices? As of today, that’s a thing of the past on the White House blog. Now you can easily view all the content of a given post across your devices — and it’s faster and more accessible.
We’re not done yet.
These are just a few things we’ve done recently, but there’s certainly more room to improve, and we’re enlisting your help to do it.
Share your feedback to help us further improve your experience with our site.
Project information: Creative direction and requirements by Ashleigh Axios, design by James Hobbs, and project management by Amanda Stone.
