Looking at the new whitehouse.gov I have to say I really like the site.  While clicking through the site I noticed it was architected in a fairly sophisticated manner. Very clean URLs (http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/georgewashington/), no enormous query strings, key-terms and description set up. Very clean code with minimal in line Javascript and css based navigation and more.

So here’s the question: Does whitehouse.gov really need to be optimized for search engine indexing?

More surprising things on the site.

• The design / layout and navigation  is contemporary, sophisticated and well thought out
• Categorized Syndication of headlines
  • RSS feeds for Agenda, Press, News, Blog, Gallery and Video Media RSS!
  • This ties in to my recent post on the importance of relevance (relevant) to the individual. I can follow the RSS how I want to.
• There’s a robots.txt file but it really isn’t blocking anything
• No xml sitemaps? I was betting there would be one given the other seo efforts
• Looking at the source code there is a good use of jquery (my favorite library) and Thickbox! Codey Lindley should be proud.
• And what are they using to measure website traffic? Webtrends. I wish Icould get a look at those reports. Especially today.
• According to W3c the site passes as valid xhtml 1.0  transitional

All In all this is pretty much exactly how I would strive to build a website for the whitehouse.

If I had any recommendation off the top of my head,  it would be to offer the user the option to increase the font size via css/javascript.