Bailouts are so Spring '09... Web design is where the real money's at.

Not to toddle too far out of our area of expertise, but speaking of Obama’s websites…

The Drupal-based Recovery.gov is getting an $18 million overhaul from Smartronix, some super-well-connected “Net-Centric Enterprise Services” outfit.

Recovery.gov tracks the manners in which all that bailout stimulus whatnot money is being wisely invested. At least now we know it goes to pay for the thing that tells us where it goes. The problem with the current site is it isn’t transparent or intuitive enough. So we’re bringing in a company with a site that looks like SkyNet to clear things up?

Look at these cats. Try to make heads or tails of what it is that they say they do here. OPERATIONAL RISK MITIGATION! SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE DEVELOPMENT! It’s like Blackwater for nerds. With more scroll bars. And no 301 redirects.

Must be nice. $18 million? For a top-level .gov linkback, we’d do it for like $1.80. Back to work…