brandondawson.org

During a brief foray into Wikipedia today, I found myself deposited on a site operated by the National Archives, that preserved the whitehouse.gov website as it existed during the transfer of power between George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

It got me to thinking: viewing the evolving capabilities, style conventions, and sensibilities of the website of this most visible of American institutions might provide insights for communicators of any stripe, whether they be marketers, writers, or political operators/organizations such as the White House is.

Failing that, it’s still an interesting walk through 256-color gifs, table layouts, the dawn of Javascript, and the birth of powerful content management systems.

Since the Clinton-era website was not preserved by the National Archives, I had to turn to Archive.org, “The Internet Wayback Machine”, in order to see the real evolution, as well as the evolving internet face of the subsequent Bush Administration.

Here are some screenshots documenting that evolution. You can click on the screenshots to pull up an embiggened slideshow view.

December 27, 1996

Here we see what the White House website looked like a few days after millions of folks took the wrapping paper off of new PCs, fired up Windows 95, and logged onto the internet using their “free” AOL discs. Very basic, it simply provides a search gateway to computerized press releases and related material.

October 23, 1997

At some point, a decision was reached to put a little more effort into the whitehouse.gov website….but not very much. Here we see just a minimal tiling background applied, and some obligatory “American” elements.

More interestingly, we see the two buttons at the bottom, which show sufficient production value as to look almost out of place. They foreshadow the first major site design, which would launch the next year.

October 22, 1999

This was the first good grab I could get of this version, which launched in 1998 and is the “quintessential” Clinton-Gore version of whitehouse.gov.

For more than three years after launch, this basic, no-frills job would be updated more or less manually to reflect the day’s events.

Note the animated-gif American flags. (Yes, kids, animated GIFs were once popular for uses other than image macros.)

Interestingly, the White House website stayed completely mute on the topic of the contentious election results, which would later be decided in Bush v. Gore on December 12, 2000.

January 18, 2001

Here we see the first real “presidential tradition” as far as the White House website is concerned, with the site reverting to a very basic textual layout highlighting various achievements of the Clinton Administration in the days prior to the inauguration of George W. Bush. We will see this tradition repeated on the departure of President Bush in 2009.

February 2, 2001

Clearly eager to extend his stated desire to “restore dignity” to the Presidency to the website, here we see George W. Bush’s web team’s first effort, showing an undignified series of horizontal buttons.

March 3, 2001

Last month’s navigation issue has been massaged by simply using a vertical navigation menu. All jokes aside, Bush’s team was actually working on an “actual” website, and this was just a placeholder to span the gap between the Clinton website and the new one, which would debut in mid-2001.

Since Bush’s Presidency was the first where news and events were truly added to the whitehouse.gov website “as they happened”, we’ll take a look at this new design as it was used during some of the tumultuous events of the 00′s.

September 12, 2001

Here we see that new design reassuring the nation in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

This layout reflects the browser and screen capabilities of the time, which were still hampered by legions of displays capable of only 800×600 resolution at 256 colors. We web designers still had to think about “web safe” colors in those days.

October 7, 2001

Here we see the same crew, running the same website, but clearly getting more comfortable with the tempo of daily operations as they seamlessly transition the White House website to a war footing with the launch of “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan.

March 20, 2003

This screenshot of the White House website on the launch of the subsequent Iraq War is more interesting purely for the historical value.

Here we see the infamous “slam dunk” briefing taking place, an image that would be repeatedly presented as the later search for the WMD we used to justify the war was proven to be a fabrication.

We also see other elements that have taken on an almost pop-cultural value, such as the color-coded “Alert Level” device. I’m sure everyone remembers the big shortage of duct-tape on the debut of that “program”.

May 5, 2003

This screenshot captures the White House website as it existed the day of the infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech by Bush.

It’s worth noting here the propaganda functions of the White House PR machinery in full swing, especially when highlighted by the fact that this later became one of Bush’s most laughed-at moments.

(Lest anyone think I’m singling out Bush for ridicule, archive.org’s record for WhiteHouse.gov ends before Obama’s Presidency, preventing me from grabbing a screenshot of the “Beer Summit“, which I think would be equally instructive in this regard.)

November 6, 2004

Here we see Bush in the wake of his narrow victory over John Kerry in the 2004 election. This was the speech in which Bush talked about “having a lot of political capital” to spend, and planning to spend it. This shot is interesting because it also documents the ongoing acclimation of the Bush White House to disseminating PR online.

This also marks the last time we’ll see this design in use for this retrospective; a new website would be designed and launched in 2007.

February 28, 2007

Here we get to the penultimate Bush Administration version of the site: an elegant and refined design that used, for the first time since the Clinton Administration, a layout that was centered. More importantly, we see the emergence of more modern, CSS-oriented approaches to the design problems presented, though the main layout is still encapsulated in a table.

January 20, 2009

Here’s the White House website on the final day of Bush’s administration. As we can see, it’s locked into the same valedictory approach that Clinton’s outgoing team took in 2001, highlighting the administration’s achievements and Bush’s farewell address.

Today

Barack Obama campaigned on the strength of internet activism and fundraising, and his team’s clear comfort with online media showed straight-away, as this version of the White House website launched within mere days of Obama’s taking office.

Built on the Drupal CMS, it foreshadowed a major government-wide effort to make the undertakings of the government more accessible to citizens, via sites such as data.gov.

Aesthetically, this design seem intended to be bridge the gap between the final Bush layout and the graphical elements, flourishes, and accents that graced Obama’s campaign website and media. Elements from both websites can be found in this design.

Next week, we’ll look at the evolving design trends of major political campaigns. This would be a great time to subscribe to my RSS or follow me on Twitter, hint hint!