The presidential inauguration was yesterday, and with every new president comes a new website. So, we’re going to go to WhiteHouse.gov, take a look at the new White House website, and give you our reaction.
First Impressions
The home page is really pretty and we love the images that were used. They definitely focused on accessibility first, making sure that this website was accessible for people with disabilities. You can see some of these elements in the left corner. They have buttons to change the contrast and text size. The designers did a really great job to include those without them being intrusive. They look like part of the website design.
The menu looks cool. While it’s not a very big website right now, we are sure that pages will be added to it in the future. The design makes it easy to expand upon.
We like how they have a story about every person in the administration. These pages are really well designed and we love the pictures they included.
The pages load really quickly. The website isn’t bloated with a lot of code. We like how they included an email opt-in at the bottom of some of the pages and included social media links. We didn’t realize that the White House even had social media pages. 🙂
Looking at the Code
We viewed the source of The White House website and saw a fun easter egg.
If you're reading this, we need your help building back better. https://usds.gov/
We loved this! The developers clearly know that people in the industry would be checking the source code.
This website is built using WordPress, which is a huge win for the WordPress community.
Page Speed
We ran the website through Google PageSpeed Insights. The scores aren’t bad, but there is room for improvement. They could reduce the image size and perhaps change the way the fonts are rendered on the site to help with load times, but this isn’t something too serious. For a large, well known site, it’s unlikely that the White House is worrying about their SEO. The developers clearly chose accessibility over speed, which is more important for a government website.
Accessibility
Accessibility was a major focus of this website. The alt tags on all of the images clearly describe exactly what you’re looking at. This was done really well. We ran the site through the accessibility tool achecker and there are no issues regarding accessibility, even at the highest standards. This is extremely rare for most websites to score perfectly. The new White House website can be used as an example of how to take accessibility into consideration without sacrificing the quality of the design.
The Designers/Developers
The designers and developers of the new White House website are an agency out of Washington D.C. called Wide Eye. Looking through their portfolio, it seems like they work on a lot of political and government based websites. We think they did a fantastic job designing and developing the new website for The White House.
