Obama v. McCain: The Battle of the Websites

Through a short series of events yesterday afternoon, I ended up comparing Barack Obama's website against John McCain's. It's quite interesting. (All following screenshots were taken Tuesday evening around 5:30 CST)

Home pages

First, let's look at home pages. They both look pretty contemporary and nice, but I'd say that McCain's looks a bit more cluttered. He tried to put a TON of stuff in a very small space. Obama, on the other hand, has spread everything out. While McCain's page only extends slightly below what you see here, Obama's goes on for a bit. But I'm OK with that. I'm used to scrolling down a page to find something. Besides, this makes it feel more relaxed and comfortable. 1 point for Obama.


Navigation

Both sites have similar navigation: a row of buttons near the top of the page. They both drop down with more selections if applicable. McCain's is grey, Obama's white. McCain's stands out a bit more against the background (the actual page), but Obama's disappears a bit. I'm inclined to say, who cares? You should know what you just clicked on. Besides, Obama's goes along with the site theme: blues, whites, and grays. McCain's gray seemed out of place to me. So again, 1 point to Obama.




Issues

The main issues here are presentation and organization. (And I'd say those two apply to every page on these sites as well) McCain's Issues page is quite colorful, and the pics are very nice. Seems good, right? Wrong. Because his whole site is colorful, these get lost in the mix. Obama does something that Stephen Few himself would appreciate: he keeps it simple and on theme. All of Obama's images are themed and not simple photos. And they're all blue. Very nice. Furthermore, Obama's issues are organized by name. Alphabetical. It's extremely easy to find what you're looking for. McCain seems to have just ordered items will-nilly. Point Obama.




Store

To get to McCain's store, you have to click your mouse twice, and open two separate websites (as either windows or tabs, depending on your internet application). Obama's is linked to directly from his nav bar. While there is nothing inherently wrong with McCain's, it's a bit old school. It looks like it might be HTML-based (XML, as it turns out). Obama's looks ... for lack of a better word, cooler. I couldn't decide how I thought they made it, but it seems to be Java-based. This lends to a much more pleasant user experience. And, Obama has things organized. You can look at all the shirts. Or all the buttons. In McCain's store, you just saw everything all the time. The final point goes to Obama.


If you were keeping score, that's 4 points Obama, 0 points McCain. We can see who wins the battle of the websites quite clearly.