I understand that President Bush is a very busy man. But if he's going to maintain a website, then can't he at least keep it current?

I publish several websites, among them is DoggieNews.com, a blog of the latest news in the dog and pet world. Yesterday, the President and First Lady announced the arrival of their new dog, Miss Beazley. I wanted to get a photo of the dog and use it with my story. So I went to Whitehouse.gov, and did a search for "beazley".

I got several hits for their other dog Barney, but only two hits for Miss Beazley. The first hit is actually for a kids feature called, coincidentally enough, "Where's Miss Beazley", which is supposed to be a feature on Barney looking for his new niece (Miss Beazley is the daughter of Barney's brother). And believe it or not, when you try to visit this feature, you are taken to a 404 page.

The other hit is for some video on Miss Beazley.

I discovered that the URL for the video of Miss Beazley has a sub-directory named, "kids". Ok, so I backspace the URL to "http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids/" to see their kids website. I click on "News" figuring I'd see something about Miss Beazley. It turns out the last news item on this page was dated March 31, 2004. You mean they haven't updated their kids news since March 31, 2004?

You'd think that of all the places that generate the most news, the White House has got to be it. And yet they can't keep their website updated? Ok, I admit that its the "kids" section we're talking about. But what if a kid did visit this website? And I'm sure thousands of kids do visit it every day. Are they to see a website that hasn't updated its news in 9 months? Then why bother publishing kids news?

As a webmaster and publisher I take pride in knowing that my websites stay fresh and current, with all links working. Whoever is running the President's website apparently doesn't have that sense of pride.