While taking office today, President Joe Biden unveiled the new whitehouse.gov website that has been built and relaunched on WordPress. The website was built on Drupal prior to 2017 during Trump’s administration and then decided to switch from Drupal framework to WordPress in 2017 and now the technology team associated with the Biden administration decided to stick with WordPress CMS.
They have taken a similar approach as adopted with the Biden-Harris Transition Team Website (also done with WordPress) preserving the features like multilingual and accessibility. The new website introduces new features like contrast and font size along with a Spanish language switcher. The new website also includes an accessibility statement with a commitment from the administration to work towards conforming to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The Biden-Harris transition site however now is forwarded to whitehouse.gov and old website pages are transferred to the archive presidential websites.
A few quick observations from industry so far:
- Creative professionals noticed that the typography has been updated from the transition site, flipping the Mercury and Decimal fonts.
- Web professionals noticed the site has got very decent Lighthouse scores.
- Code investigators noticed an advertisement for the U.S. Digital Service(USDS), the group of technologists who maintain many of the federal government’s public-facing digital services.
- In addition to the message from USDS, the site’s source code includes a link to the US government’s analytics program at usa.gov. Tim Lowden, who handles the federal government’s combined web analytics program, said this data has been made available for the first time since late 2017.
- The analytics service records more than 2.5 billion page views across federal government websites each month. The data is available to the public. It shows information for visitors’ devices, browsers, operating systems, and location broken down into cities and countries.
