The White House

Launching a total website redesign — just in time.

In late 2008, a few weeks before Barack Obama’s inauguration, I got a call from my pal Matt Ipcar, a brilliant web designer who’d worked on the Obama campaign in Chicago and was then serving as the lead designer for the transition team in D.C.

Matt’s biggest project for the transition was a total redesign of WhiteHouse.gov, and he told me that the team needed some help relaunching the site. Was I interested in coming down to D.C. for a few weeks to pitch in?

It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. Working with the small core team, I helped with content strategy, writing, editing, content loading, CMS wrangling, IA refinements, and assorted other tasks. After two weeks of extremely long days and nights, we pushed the site live at around 3 a.m. on January 20, 2009, a few hours before Obama was sworn in as the nation’s 44th president. It was a hell of day.