Maybe you couldn’t care less who becomes the next president of the USA. Maybe you have a hard time deciding who to vote for. Maybe you’re a shallow moron who bases his voting decision on how good the candidate’s web site looks.
If you are, you’ve arrived at the right place. I carefully (read: carelessly) analyzed both ticket’s web sites to help you decide who you should vote for.
Design
Obama – The Obama-Biden web site is well designed, although slow. It received a makeover from its already-good design at the end of last year, and it looks even better now. It has well-thought-out menu navigation, pleasing fonts, and a great color scheme. The site promotes campaign action on your part and makes you want to help Obama win.
McCain – The McCain-Palin site looks good, but not nearly as good as the Obama site. In fact, at first glance, it appears to be a poor imitation of the former. It does have some advantages, though: nice animations on the home page, a photo gallery, etc. Its navigation menus, however, look awful when juxtaposed against Obama’s Also, the site doesn’t have that same energetic, glowing feel to it.
In short, Obama’s site is a lot like Obama, and McCain’s site is a lot like McCain.
Speed
When it comes to page load speeds, however, McCain has a real advantage. Although both sites employ a tacky sign-up landing page that needs to be circumnavigated to get to the real thing, McCain’s site loads considerably faster on the landing and home pages, although it lags a bit in the content pages, probably because YouTube videos take a long time to load.
Anyway, here are the numbers (which I timed with my wristwatch): Obama’s site took 50 seconds to load the landing page and 49 seconds to load the home page. His “About” page took 9 seconds to load. McCain’s site took 27 seconds to load the landing page and 11 seconds to load the home page; it, however, took 21 seconds to load the “About” page, although the page was semi-usable before it was fully loaded.
Conclusion
The presidential candidates’ web sites epitomize their characters: Obama’s is good-looking, but a bit slow, whereas McCain’s is a bit wrinkly, but more usable.
