White House Web Site: Better, but Not a Hit

After seven months of remaking 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to their liking, President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush on Friday unveiled the overhaul of another tony address: the White House Internet site.

For months, after Bush jettisoned thousands of documents that former President Clinton had placed on the site, the White House home page had been little more than a place holder on the information superhighway.

White House officials had replaced the Clinton pages with sparse graphics and basic information, seemingly indifferent to the interactivity and user-friendliness typical of big corporate and government Web sites. Clicking an old White House link offering Clinton media briefings, for instance, returned the message: “Due to the change of administration, all publications have been removed from this server.”

The site (https://www.whitehouse.gov), however, tries to be more inviting.

It sports a less formal design, featuring pastel colors, multimedia components and improved access for disabled users.

“I’m very impressed, and I think the people who access this Web site will be impressed as well,” Bush said. He took a short virtual tour of the site Friday with designer Jane Cook, the former Web master of the Texas governor’s office.

Bush noted that for the first time the White House site offers much of its content in Spanish as well as English. “That’s important because I want all Americans to understand our priorities coming into the fall will be our economy, education, opportunity and security.”

But some experts said that while the White House site is a big improvement, it falls short of being an overall winning design.

“I’d give it a C+,” said Jakob Nielsen, a former Sun Microsystems Inc. engineer who is an expert on Web page design.

Nielsen noted that the Spanish translation doesn’t extend to the important navigational bars at the top of the White House Web page; they still appear in English, even though the content below is in Spanish.

He also said the page’s fancy cursive script “is hard to read.”

“I think the visually impaired will find it hard to decipher,” Nielsen said.

Other experts were somewhat less critical.

“This one certainly has a lot more stuff on it than the old page, and it’s very accessible for people with disabilities,” said Steve Telleen, vice president of Giga Information Group’s Web site scorecard service.

Though the White House promised that the Web pages would be updated frequently, Nielsen said he found it troubling that the last media briefing posted on the site was dated July 25.

“Have they not done any work in August?” Nielsen quipped. (The president held his last news briefing Aug. 24.)

But in other respects, the new site is a world apart from the typical drab government Web site, Nielsen said.

It now sports on-demand video Web-casts and Real Audio. Closed-captioning allows the hearing-impaired to view the Web-casts, and for those with impaired vision, a synthesized voice can read the contents aloud.

The Web site also has an area for children (https://www.whitehousekids.gov) that uses pets and ranch animals to help them learn about the White House and the federal government.

Bush quipped that he was “impressed that Barney [the purple dinosaur from a PBS television show] plays a major role in helping the young people understand what’s going on in Washington, D.C.”