Bush's whitehouse.gov launches with embarrassing errors, bugs

[Declan McCullagh]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41319,00.html

   Anybody Home at Whitehouse.gov?
   by Declan McCullagh (declan at wired.com)
   4:00 p.m. Jan. 21, 2001 PST
   
   WASHINGTON -- President Bush not only got the keys to the White House
   this weekend, but he also took over the official whitehouse.gov
   website.
   
   While the new president's speedily organized inaugural celebration
   concluded without incident in a chill rain, the launch of the Bush
   administration's Web presence was not as successful.
   
   Dozens of links return error messages, and the home page appears to
   have sported an unusual slogan on the left-hand rail when it first
   went up on Saturday: "Insert Something Meaningful Here."
   
   At high noon on Saturday, as Bush and Vice President Cheney took oaths
   of office on the Capitol building steps, the new administration
   officially took over the whitehouse.gov domain.
   
   Many of the text-only whitehouse.gov pages, designed for readers who
   are visually impaired or have low-bandwidth connections, return broken
   links. Clicking on the text-only option from the search page results
   in a malformed link with the title:
   "www.whitehouse.gov/--%20INTERFACE%20LINK%20."

   Links at the bottom of the White House History page -- including past
   first families, first ladies, or tour information -- return "404: The
   page cannot be found".
   
   In the children's area of whitehouse.gov, the Historic Moments page
   includes broken links to images of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin
   Roosevelt.

   On the home page, the placeholder message "Insert Something Meaningful
   Here" briefly appeared on the left side of the screen, according to a
   Wired News reader who saved a screen snapshot. The message, according
   to the snapshot, appeared under "President George W. Bush is
   Inaugurated as President of the United States" and above "Recent
   Additions."
   
   [...]

Remainder at:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41319,00.html

Snapshot of "insert something meaningful here" (also submitted by other
readers):
http://www.brianwestbrook.com/whitehousegov.html

Examples of pages with broken links:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids/text/moments.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/tours/text/map.html

Or, for example, click on "text only" from the search page:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/search




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