Back after a long hiatus, just in time to point out the first travesty of the new Bush administration.

On the left, the most recent redesign of the Clinton White House web site. In the middle, for purposes of fairness, the original Clinton web site, from the prehistoric era of 1994. On the right, the current design of the Bush White House web site. Click on the thumbnails for a full-size version.

The Clinton thumbnails take you to the government archive of the sites. The Bush thumbnails take you to a snapshot of the whitehouse.gov site made on 1/21/01. Why? Because the archives will never change; hopefully, whitehouse.gov will.

The first Clinton site is pretty amateurish by today’s standards, but it was nearly state of the art then. The recent Clinton site is top-notch. Well-designed, lots of information, good navigation tools. So why did the Bush administration ditch it for something that looks like it popped out of a shareware web editor?

I can understand the new folks wanting the rip up the old carpets, but this is showing the bare floorboards until they get around to it. I can understand not wanting to use an existing framework for content, when on day two of the Bush presidency there just isn’t much to say. But surely they can do better than this? Or is communicating with the public just not as important as getting contributions for the inaugural celebration?

Before you think that Bush didn’t want to use the Clinton HTML, check out the new privacy policy, then look at the old one. And if you think I’m just talking about esthetics, think again.

Yes, I know, in a few weeks it’ll probably be better. But does anyone think the site would look this bad today if the Supreme Court had ruled for Al Gore?