In the 72 hours since Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, few subjects seem to have gotten more press attention than the administration’s use of technology. The economy? Guantánamo? Gaza? They can wait. Haven’t you heard? The president gets to keep his BlackBerry.

It isn’t clear if BlackBerry actually means BlackBerry or if it’s Secret Service code for a more secure and NSA-approved device like the $3,500 Sectera Edge, but either device is likely to be the most advanced piece of technology in the West Wing, where new staffers showed up this week and experienced a bit of technology culture shock. The team, accustomed to blogging, shooting video and reaching out with Facebook and an iPhone application were greeted, according to the Washington Post, with outdated software, phone lines to nowhere and a hodgepodge of computers suited for different uses. “It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” a spokesman told the newspaper.

One area where the new administration apparently refuses to lag behind though is the new WhiteHouse.gov. As millions of people watched the inauguration in Washington on CNN and online Tuesday, someone was flipping the proverbial switch on the new site: the first version of the presidential website to get a blog and embedded YouTube videos (the White House legal team gave YouTube an exemption from federal privacy rules). It’s little surprise to see such developments after witnessing Obama’s groundbreaking campaign, but it is refreshing.

The new website isn’t perfect, however, so here’s our free advice for the president and his team.

  • Redirects: As of this writing, Google’s top result when searching for “state of the union” is a 404 error on the White House website. Declaring “Page Not Found” might not be the message the administration wants to send to citizens, but today there are countless links pointing to pages that no longer exist from the Bush era, and they’re doing exactly that. Configuring a large site to redirect all those page requests to the proper places can be a pain, but it’s worth the time.
  • Size matters: It’s a common trap web developers can fall into: making a site that loads too slow on anything but the fastest connection. The front page of the new site took almost 10 seconds to load at the office (the page is actually 41 different text and image files that load one by one), and YSlow, a tool made by Yahoo! and used by developers to optimize sites, gives it an F.
  • Mobile: So far there is no mobile-optimized version of the site. For those who do plenty of web browsing from their iPhones, where’s the love?
  • SEO: The redirects will help with search engine optimization. So will telling the robots what to do. And don’t forget each page on the site needs a different description and list of keywords.

We could go on, but the site’s quite an upgrade from 12 years ago. So, call him The Internet President, call him Mr. Digital, just don’t call him on his BlackBerry because he’s probably tapping out an e-mail to a friend and doesn’t want to be interrupted.