WASHINGTON -- It's no secret that the First Homepage is second rate.
For the last four months, critics have been savaging whitehouse.gov by calling it state-of-the-art -- five years ago.
Then, just as the Bush administration was finalizing plans to relaunch the site, malicious hackers appear to have defaced the executive branch homepage on Tuesday. In addition, a denial-of-service attack left whitehouse.gov unreachable from, according to a Web monitor, around 2:30 p.m. EDT to 8:20 p.m.
Around 3:45 p.m., a Wired News reporter spotted a black page with three items -- two dead links to news articles and a link to a mirror of a previous hack -- on the whitehouse.gov home page. A White House spokesman confirmed a denial-of-service attack took place but said, "I'm not aware of a hack at this time."
Still, President Bush plans to redesign and relaunch his homepage in the next month or so.
"The site will be dramatically improved within a matter of weeks," White House spokesman Tucker Eskew said during an interview before the attack took place.
"We take very seriously our response to be stewards of the history and traditions of this place," Eskew said. A revamped whitehouse.gov, he believes, will reflect Bush's serious, self-effacing approach to serving in the highest office in the land.
It's also intended to reflect advances in Web design. Back when former President Bill Clinton launched whitehouse.gov at a ceremony in October 1994, multimedia meant including the occasional JPEG image file with the text of a speech or press release.
Now, however, visitors expect the same rich audio and video that commercial websites provide. Bush's aides expect to draw on the wealth of daily content already generated -- albeit in analog form -- by the official White House photographer and video crew that often accompanies the president throughout the day.
"We've added a good deal more streaming media with each passing week," said Eskew. "(Future efforts) will be done internally with resources already available."
To redesign whitehouse.gov, the Bush administration has organized a team of about a dozen people -- including career staff, information technology specialists, public relations workers, and strategic planners -- that meets frequently but irregularly. After the redesign is complete, they'll brief Bush on their plans.
The whitehouse.gov site has always been more than merely another bucket of bits: It's a prominent symbol of the federal government, which means it regularly becomes a target for anti-American sentiment.
Earlier this month, online vandals -- officials suspect pro-China hackers -- launched a denial-of-service attack against whitehouse.gov, making the site unreachable for a few hours. White House officials refused to discuss counter-measures that have been adopted since then.
During Tuesday's whitehouse.gov outage, the denial-of-service attack left whitehouse.gov crippled. A monitoring program illustrates how technicians struggled to thwart the attack, with intermittent success throughout the evening until around 8:20 p.m.
In May 1999, electronic intruders -- apparently upset over the NATO bombing in Yugoslavia -- forced whitehouse.gov offline for over 24 hours. A White House spokesman said at the time that the system was offline after "an attempt was made ... to break into the system that operates the White House Web page."
Sensitive documents, such as ones aides and officials exchange via email, are stored on a system that is not linked with the whitehouse.gov Web server.
But irksome hackers aren't the only technical challenges the White House staff has had to confront.
When Bush's aides took over management of the site in January during the first electronic presidential transition, dozens of links returned error messages, and the homepage temporarily sported an unusual phrase on the left-hand rail: "Insert Something Meaningful Here."
The White House dismisses the problems as minor ones, with one official saying the glitches are "easily attributable to a transition which the career technical staff had not been through before."
Still, the incident gave Democratic partisans a chance to jab at a president who took office after one of the most controversial elections in U.S. history. One Democratic consultant who helped with the original whitehouse.gov site quipped at the time: "The site looks like an extremely dimpled chad."
Jakob Nielsen, a Web usability guru who critiqued the initial Bush whitehouse.gov site, says any redesign should include usability analysis and testing.
"I usually say, 'Look at competitive sites,'" Nielsen said. "But since there's only one president, you may not have that in the narrow sense. You could look at governors' sites or Canadian government sites or the 10 Downing Street site."
If the White House team did compare whitehouse.gov to number-10.gov.uk, they'd likely find few similarities. The British site is far more graphically pleasing, it offers a deeper and richer history, and visitors can sign up for tailored news updates.
Nielsen faults the current White House site for including sections that are not yet working or are labeled as under construction. "They have a site for kids which is nice but it's completely empty," Nielsen said. "That's going to be really disappointing for little kids. It's much worse than not having anything."
He also suggests creating archives for past radio addresses, using more descriptive titles for them, fixing errors instead of including separate "errata" sections in reports, and including excerpts of important sections of audio or video in addition to the complete stream.
Ari Schwartz, an analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, said: "The White House website should not be a P.R. resource. This is a mistake made by many elected officials."
Schwartz said an important purpose of the whitehouse.gov site should be to guide visitors through the policy maze, and he believes the current version falls short. Talking about the "Your Government" section, he said: "The page is three-quarters white and the links to follow are in the bottom lower left corner. The second of these links is 'EOP Offices & Agencies.' I doubt that 1 percent of the population could tell you what EOP is -- even in context."
The Executive Office of the President -- the meaning of the cryptic acronym -- seems to be taking these criticisms in stride, and says to wait for the relaunch.
"The site will be friendlier to look at and interact with and easier to search," Eskew said. "It'll be deeper in content, and there will be a new organization of the site with a more creative approach."
