BarackObama.com vs JohnMcCain.com
Simply by looking and comparing the websites of BarackObama.com and JohnMcCain.com, one can clearly see which candidate’s campaign chooses an up to date website design in the Web 2.0 world. As a web developer (still a newbie, less than a year of work experience), I am more drawn to Barack Obama’s website rather than John McCain’s for several reasons (none being political).
The Navigation Menu
BarackObama.com has a sleek design with a rollover secondary-menu appear effect similar to JohnMcCain.com, except it features more secondary navigation items in less space. JohnMcCain.com’s primary nav item “Issues” lists a long secondary menu that stretches half the window depending on your resolution settings.
Homepage Look and Feel
When I looked at JohnMcCain.com, I immediately saw room for improvement with graphical design. The center content area isn’t dynamic like BarackObama.com which has a dynamic content slider. Also, there is much less content on JohnMcCain.com than BarackObama.com, which perhaps might be a good thing depending on the user, it can still use a lot more graphical and usability improvement.
Social Networking Links
On BarackObama.com you will see at the bottom of the right sidebar all of major social networking sites with links to Obama’s profiles on each of them. On JohnMcCain.com, I couldn’t find anything, but then again McCain is from a different age group and era of America.
The Code
A simple right click and view source (or if you have the FireBug plugin for Firefox) you can inspect the code to see how tidy and professional it is. Again, BarackObama.com impresses me much more than JohnMcCain.com.
jQuery! BarackObama.com uses jQuery (of which I am huge fan of) while JohnMcCain.com doesn’t. McCain’s site also is pretty messy at the top due to the javascript in the header. They could have put that in a .js file and included it in one line to make life easier, but then again that’s just my personal opinion and preference.
Totally random fact, but Obama’s site uses Google analytics, but McCain’s site doesn’t.
Conclusion
Vote!
