SotW: Goin’ Presidential! (1 of 2)

April 24th, 2008 by Matt

So I know I promised three different posts for the Presidential Candidates’ sites, but I decided to just roll them all together in to the site o’ the week! It’s going to be a little lengthy, so I’ll split it in to two parts. Here are the (somewhat revised) criteria I will be judging the sites on:

• Logo (10 pts)
• Organization of Index (10 pts)
• Code (15 pts)
• Interactivity (10 pts)
• Access to Essential Information (20 pts)
• Do I Care? (10 pts)

Lets get started.

Logo (10 pts)

McCain’s logo is pretty decent. It’s simple, straightforward and what you would expect from a war veteran’s logo.

It goes along with the general look of his page and the demographic he is going after. It has that good ol’ strong republican feel too it, stocky and straightforward.

Obama’s logo represents his campaign perfectly. It’s light an airy with a great web 2.0 feel to it. While the designing of his logo reflects the most current change in web design, Obama’s campaign reflects the most current change in politics.

This one is the winner in the logo category by far. The way it just meshes in to his site and its use throughout is truely impressive.

Hillary’s logo is a little lacking. You can get the general idea…but there really isn’t too much to it. This is the worst of the three logos. There is a patriotic theme behind it, like Obama’s logo, but no real story.

Hillary’s logo scores the worst. I’m pretty confident I could have come up with something better. While McCain’s logo symbolizes his military experience and Obama’s his desire for change, Hillary’s just symbolizes a ribbon…cool.

Organization of Index (10 pts)

When you first glance over McCain’s index, you notice that the majority of the visible space is devoted to his “It’s Time for Action Tour”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include a description of what this tour is…or anything about what he’s aiming to do with it for that matter. For something you’re devoting about 20% of your initial index space too, you think you could just throw a little text next to that amazing image of McCain staring off in to the future of our country to let us know what’s up. He does have an appealing image talking about a tax holiday on gas (whoooo!) and also has three (count ‘em, 3) ways to sign up for his newsletter all with a cramped 300×600 pixel area on the right side of the screen. The navigation is pretty well organized, and the content on the front page is pretty useful. He does have two links to his store and his News box is full with entries from yesterday, both of which are pretty useless.

Obama’s index is extremely well thought out. There is no repeated information throughout the entire page. The heirarchy of information is pretty well thought out too, with interactivity obviously being the main priority. On the right side of the page there are a good 5 divs devoted to interaction, including the top div which lays out four simple ways to get involved. Obama’s 20% of image dedicated space (seems to be a trend…) is a group of rotating images, all of which are well styled and fully explained, allowing him the maximum use of the space. Under that, his first two largest sections are blog and news, both of which span the past couple of days and have enough room to display a good amount of content. Great organization, again the winner in this category.

HILLARY WANTS YOUR MONEY! Or at least thats what her site screams. While she is going to make up some lost ground where her logo is concerned, the one piece of repeated information is really bugging me. When I first went to the site, I got hit with a splash page not asking me to sign up for a newsletter, but instead ordering me to donate.

The “Contribute” links are also scattered around her homepage (three within a good 200 pixels of each other, all brightly styled), as well as repeated links to her store. The rest of her information is well organized. Her 20% image (yup, it was a trend) is static, but is well used by also containing a form to sign up for her newsletter and, you guessed it, a link to “contribute”. A small focus on interactivity, with a somewhat cramped feel.

Code (15 pts)

McCain’s page doesn’t even have a doctype and is a tabled layout. I’m just stopping there.

While Obama’s site does go through the validator with 48 errors, most are in code other than HTML. There are some basic errors, such as not closing img tags and a mix-up with the head tag. The CSS is well coded with only 12 errors in over 1,000 lines of code. Good score overall, but not perfect.

Hillary’s code is ok, there is some HTML being used for styling, but at least it isn’t tables. She comes through the validator the cleanest with only 37 errors. Her styles are well organized and easy to sift through. Hillary saves herself with the code.

And with Hillary pulling a suprising comback from her poor logo, we now have Obama in first, Hillary in second and McCain in a far third.
Check back in a couple days for the conclusion and you’re winner for Design ‘08!