Fish & Monkeys

There’s still over a year left before the 2008 presidential election, but things are beginning to heat up for the primaries. We have our own favorites for the race, but we decided to take a quick look at the official sites of some of the leading candidates to see how web design was figuring into campaign efforts. As expected, the red-white-blue theme dominates most sites as well as imagery of flags and stars. There’s not much difference in terms of content from site to site, so we decided to compare the initial impressions we got from the homepages - the overall feel, effectiveness of communication, and organization.

Here’s a quick ranking of sites based on their homepage effectiveness and some thoughts on what we liked/disliked about them:

1) JohnEdwards.com
It’s clean, well-organized and the use of the earthy colors complements the bold red and blue very well. The right-side column could use better organization, perhaps with a bounding box around the How You Can Take Action items. Overall, the homepage has a youthful and energetic feel.

2) JohnMcCain.com
This is probably the only site that doesn’t feature the flag’s colors prominently on its homepage. Instead, we see a very Army-esque black and yellow that seems to echo McCain’s pro-war stance. The homepage, optimized for a wider screen, is elegantly laid out with a nice mix of images and text. The Straight Talk Express slideshow is a nice touch and a good way to recap McCain’s campaigning efforts, but it’s placed lower on the homepage and doesn’t get as much exposure as the static image of McCain on the top-right, which is a bit wordy for an image and may be better served as a dynamic Flash slideshow.

3) JoinRudy2008.com
Yes, it’s not the most attractive site - the color scheme is awful and the dark gray background makes the homepage even more drab. But you have to applaud Giuliani’s team for embracing simplicity - a no-nonsense layout with a limited number of sections: main image, Join/Contribute/Get Involved box (although we ask, why must it stick out on the side?) , Special Features, and Live Feed. And an added bonus - the absence of dizzying drop-down menus (30+ items for McCain vs. 8 items for Giuliani).

4) HillaryClinton.com
It’s a nice and clean site, and I’m sure in many ways it’s worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost to build it, but there’s something unremarkable and rather forgettable about her homepage. It’s very plain and doesn’t stir much excitement, especially the too-subtle sky blue hues. We had some issues with the strange beveled bar that continues out from the navigation bar onto the background - why is that there? Also, if you’re going to have a spiffy, expensive site, couldn’t you invest a few more bucks on better-looking icons? The ones under Team Hillary Action Center are just awful and remind us of lame Windows icons.

5) BarackObama.com
For tech and info-savvy visitors who repeatedly come to this site to follow Obama’s progress and whereabouts, this site works extremely well. But for those who want to get an initial impression, there’s much to be desired in simplicity and organization. It’s hard to get a sense of what Obama is about from a brief glance at the homepage - you really have to read the small text. We do give the homepage credit for keep itself vertically limited so that all sections are visible without scrolling. And his soft-glow orb logo made us think “President 2.0.”

6) MittRomney.com
An unimpressive site that is clean overall but bland in its branding. We didn’t like how the Stay Informed section contained everything vertically so that you had to scroll down some in order to read Top Mitt News Stories and Word on the Web. What’s with “Romney” not being featured on the top banner? A big no-no.

Websites, of course, do not decide the outcome of an election. In fact, they probably have very little impact in actually influencing voters. And it’s important to note that these sites are more similar to each other than they are different. There is a certain campaign website convention that each seems to follow, so it’s not a matter of one site being that much better than the other, but small details that make one site more pleasing and, in some cases, more effective in navigation and communication.