WhiteHouse.gov - before and after

Today was a historic day. The nation saw the biggest inaugural crowd ever, the peaceful transition of power (and a massive shift in politics), and — what we web designers really care about — a new WhiteHouse.gov web site.

Yes, at exactly 12:00 noon, just minutes before Chief Justice Roberts and President Obama stumbled over the exact wording of the presidential oath (really, you had just one job today, Roberts — and you screwed it up), the official White House web site switched over from the Bush version (which interestingly just got a redesign a few months ago…not sure why they bothered) to the shiny Obama edition.

All joking about “change” aside, I really do find the new site interesting. For one thing, it obviously exhibits the high level of polish and design sense that all of Obama’s sites have demonstrated over the past couple years. It now includes a blog. It has a clear statement on copyright, creative commons, and the DMCA (very significant for those battling our archaic copyright laws). The whole site is designed to be a platform to support Obama’s pledge for transparent government, and looking at it purely from a web designer’s point of view it’s a great start.

Even looking at the source, it’s clean code. Tags are organized, tend to be properly indented, and CSS classes are named well most of the time. Javascript (in the form of jQuery — my personal fav) is used efficiently and effectively to enhance the experience without weighing down the page. Graphical elements and typography are generally strong and well optimized, with only a few exceptions. It’s encouraging that his digital team takes this much care with the web site — I think it bodes well for all Internet denizens that the new president clearly has a great number of people who “get” the power of the Internet — and the power of good design.

UPDATE: CNN now has a story about the new web site.

I was digging through some old files on one of my hard drives the other night and came across what I believe is my very first web site design, from my early college days in 2002. I had cobbled together a few web sites before this in high school, but the mockup you see here is the first time I actually planned the whole design in advance with a graphics program (Macromedia FireWorks, in this case). Please keep in mind, this was done by someone with zero art or graphics training, so excuse the atrocious green! MRNonline.net was sort of a blog (way before there was all this great blogging software available), sort of a community site — I ran it for my friends off of a server in my dorm room for about a year, providing news and discussion forums. I wrote the whole thing from scratch using ColdFusion (the first dynamic web language I taught myself…that was the first and last time I used CF), and the whole experience taught me a lot. I’ve designed dozens of sites in the six years since, but this was what really kicked me off on loving web design. Sadly, it’s the oldest surviving piece of my work that I can find — I’ve been unable to locate a copy of the very first web site I built, which I believe was in 1998 or 1999, but I did that with FrontPage so seeing that code might prompt tears of agony rather than nostalgia.

It’s kind of fun to look back at where you came from, especially if what you find was done at a time when you had no idea that such work might be your career one day. This type of fun digging and nostalgia also reminds me of how important it is to back stuff up — due to a hard drive crash a number of years ago, I lost everything I ever wrote and created for high school. I don’t need that stuff, obviously, but it would be fun to have.

What kind of work do you have really old examples of?

After trying and discarding about a dozen different design ideas, I give you the new RogersMJ.com theme: Sovereign. This theme works in all browsers (with a couple visual oddities in Internet Explorer 6, of course), and I think it turned out pretty darn well.

I have long wanted to replace the old design that I launched late last summer; I thought it was too plain in some spots, and it also had some browser incompatibilities. Sovereign should last me awhile. It is written as a Wordpress theme, and I will be releasing it once I’ve cleaned up some of the code and am certain there are no major bugs. Now that I finally have scratched my design itch, I’ll be getting around to a lot of content I’ve been wanting to add for awhile — mostly stuff about CSS and web design.

If you notice a problem anywhere on the site, or want to let me know what you think of the new design, just leave a comment!

I am pleased to announce my first Wordpress theme called Atlantis. I created this theme for use with my own site (I was using it for the last 6 months or so), and got lots of requests to release it. It’s a dark theme that comes with the ability to easily customize the color scheme (it comes with six and you can easily create your own) and determine which of your pages appear as “tabs” along the top just by setting custom fields in your posts. I also threw in some custom navigation functions designed to tame large page lists and a recently updated pages notifier that inserts a subtle announcement at the top of the home page.

Since this theme has a number of options, please make sure to read the README file. I know dark themes aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re into it then enjoy!

Screenshot and download:
http://rogersmj.com/design/wordpress/atlantis

Please post any comments on the Atlantis download page.

P.S. No live demo right now, but I hope to get that up tomorrow. Must sleep right now.