The new site features a blog, a number of RSS feeds, and YouTube video clips – which all reflect the new administration’s focus on communication, transparency and participation. The design looks great too – fresh, clean, and easy to navigate (with some nice design features, like gradient shading for backgrounds and borders). For the more geeky readers, kottke.org notes another ‘small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government’ are the changes to the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file (which tells search engines what to include and not include in their indexes).

The prompt and obvious re-design of the whitehouse.gov site is a good reminder of how important it is for your website to reflect your own values, culture and goals (not those of a competitor, previous owner or website designer). If your business or organisation has a change in leadership, direction or the products and services you offer, don’t let updating your website be something you get round to doing later, make it a key part of your communication strategy from day one.

If you are unfamiliar with Doggo, it is a directory of dog parks, beaches and dog friendly accommodation throughout Australia. What makes Doggo different from the other pet directories out there is that it uses Google Map technology to let users search for locations within a particular search radius of a given address or location. Site users can also rate the parks, beaches or accommodation and leave comments to help others select the best place to go with their doggy mates.

We currently have over 700 locations in the directory and are in the process of adding lots more – so if you have any suggestions or would like to add a location head over to the submit page.

If you’d like to support Doggo the best thing you can do is spread the word! Tell all your friends about it, link to it, blog about it. . . why you can even sing about it if you want!

Some other tid-bits about the site:

• Doggo is now built completely on WordPress , demonstrating that WordPress can be used for much more that just blogging!
• You can subscribe to the Blog Feed, Accommodation Feed and Dog Park Feed to keep up-to-date with all the latest additions to the site .
• The site is now gravatar (globally recognised avatar) enabled – so if you’d like a pretty picture to come up when you comment on the site, head on over to gravatar.com to register .

The new layout (which you can see at the moment) is quite a bit cleaner and has a much more professional look. It’s not quite finished yet so bare with me as I make a few more tweaks over the next few days. And as always, feedback and recommendations are welcome.