Donald Trump’s takeover of the White House’s website is going to come in on time and under budget — with a larger reboot planned a bit later in 2017.

Trump’s digital team plans to put off for a few months any major overhaul to the official White House online portal, even as it will relaunch to reflect the voice and message of its new occupant almost in tandem with Trump’s swearing in at noon Friday.


Trump transition aides told POLITICO they’re keeping — for now — the basic shell and design built under the leadership of President Barack Obama, including the fonts, format and blue colors that have come to be associated with many aspects of the outgoing Democratic administration.

And, recognizing the blowback Obama got in 2012 for appending information about his own presidency onto the biography pages of some of his predecessors, Team Trump said it won’t touch the sites for past presidents and first ladies.

“That content is not political. It’s about the White House as an institution,” said Ory Rinat, who is advising the Trump transition on digital strategy.

The immediate goal for the short-staffed Trump transition team, Rinat said, was to not reinvent the wheel on the White House website’s basic features, but to save money and allow time for incoming West Wing staff to familiarize themselves with the official government procurement process that goes into running the entire 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. digital shop.

“Any major redesign done well takes months,” Rinat said. “We wanted to make sure this was done right and with the people who are going to be running the website involved.”

Of course, visitors to whitehouse.gov will notice some obvious differences once Trump is inaugurated. For starters, all Obama-specific content, from pictures of the 44th president to his policy positions and news releases, will be removed, frozen the moment his term ends, and shipped to the National Archives and Records Administration for permanent safekeeping.

In its place will be pictures and information about Trump and the new administration, as well as a platform that the incoming president’s aides say will help the public engage with the new team. Expect a more videocentric website. Still unclear: whether the site will include any kind of acknowledgment (or even a direct running feed) featuring Trump’s prolific personal Twitter account.

Across Trump’s government, the agency websites are unlikely to see any big style changes timed with the inauguration, though Obama-specific information is expected to come down as the new administration starts staffing up the different departments.

Trump will be the fourth president holding the keys to the White House website, which Bill Clinton launched in 1994 when there were still less than 1,000 sites on the entire Internet. Each administration since Clinton’s has put its own stamp on the government’s online footprint; President George W. Bush, for example, put his whole government online, while Obama became the country’s first president to fully embrace social media.

For Trump, the White House website offers yet another powerful platform to get his ideas out. Former West Wing digital staffers explained, for example, that content written up on the official page often skyrocketed to the top of Google searches, giving the administration a relatively inexpensive way to amplify its policy and political message at key moments in a debate.

“You have that advantage as president,” said David Almacy, former internet and e-communications director of the George W. Bush White House.

Beyond his official site, Trump has signaled he will maintain a heavy presence on the social media platforms that helped him succeed as a first-time political candidate. He recently told The Sunday Times of London he plans to keep using his personal @RealDonaldTrump Twitter account, which has topped 20 million followers.

Other digital forums that the Trump team has used have also proved to be popular. Tuesday night, incoming White House social media director Dan Scavino posted a 45-second Facebook Live video of Trump boarding his airplane that quickly picked up 1.8 million views. And Trump’s news conference last week at Trump Tower netted 4.2 million views on the same Facebook platform, according to incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer.

"I think when you look at it in the context of a lot of media outlets, [that] is a pretty stunning figure to talk about the breadth and depth of what he is able to capture on not just Twitter but clearly on Facebook and other social channels,” Spicer told reporters on Wednesday.

On the official side, Trump’s digital team won’t just be inheriting a website. Obama is also handing over nine different official White House Twitter handles (@WhiteHouse, @POTUS, @VP, @FLOTUS, @PressSec, @LaCasaBlanca, @WHLive, @VPLive and @Cabinet), as well as official White House accounts for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Medium, Tumblr and Flickr.

All the Obama content will have been scrubbed for Trump by the time of the inauguration, according to a blog post published Tuesday by Obama White House deputy chief digital officer Kori Schulman.

During his campaign and the transition, Trump’s sites have included features allowing visitors to share feedback about the Republican’s presidential run. Still, Democratic digital experts say their expectations remain low that Trump will seriously use the medium for anything more than pushing out his own opinions.

“I think they’ll view it more as a window than a door,” said David Lytel, a former Bill Clinton aide who helped launch the first White House website.

Added Joe Rospars, a chief digital strategist for Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns: “Our team was focused on design and content that reflected the dignity of the office, a sense of humility at the honor of it, and the inclusiveness of representing all Americans. I suspect they'll be doing something different than that.”