A New White House .Gov
This post was made Jan 20, 2009 by Carlos del Rio
Credit: Brian Warren
Today marks a change for a country. A change not only in the leadership of the United States, but also in the conception of technology. Take as an early example the difference between the Bush and Obama WhiteHouse.gov. A move from a 3-column text heavy design to a more sparse graphic driven design. And even more telling the new White House Blog.
Within minutes Google re-cached the site, Jan 20, 2009 17:09:41 GMT — seven minutes and 41 seconds after the constitutionally indicated transfer.
The one drawback of the new WhiteHouse.gov are technical issues, the site design is huge 810k uncompressed! Forty-five percent of US homes have less than a 1.44mb/s Internet connection, this means that almost half of the US will wait up to 3 minutes (56k) for the page to load. The homepage uses 29 images (the CSS potentially calls 90+ images) to construct the design. For this White House to fulfill the promise of being more open in communication they need to redesign the site to be significantly smaller.
And this is how:
- Reduce rollovers — they aren’t necessary. CSS rollovers can be better than JavaScript, but not doing rollovers is better.
- Reduce the size of the graphics — avoid large graphics.
- Reduce the number of graphics — avoid spacer graphics, the latency for every object is 0.2 – 0.7 seconds. By simply getting rid of the smaller graphics entirely can make a significant difference. This WhiteHouse.gov version 1 has enough objects that 15 – 60 seconds is spent waiting for objects to transfer.
- Use compression — even compressed the current version is 500k. Reducing the graphics and scripting could split that in half.
And for anyone that is interested WhiteHouse.gov uses WebTrends to analyze traffic. I am interested to see how, and how often, this site changes over the next few years.
i hope you sent this info to the white house.