Website Envy

Has anyone noticed how much the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama websites look alike?! If you haven't seen them yet, check out www.hillaryclinton.com and www.barackobama.com. Visually, it's quite striking initially. The homepages' color palettes are the same: red, white, and blue. The layout and features (not so surprisingly) bear a marked resemblance to each other's respective site. Hillary's is more structured, organized, and decided in layout and dare I say, more presidential, in appeal. Barack's is a little less polished and potentially more decided in its Web 2.0-esque appeal. It appears less structured and unintentional and more open and busy. Elements appear more loosely put together, it has the appearance of an almost user-generated content site, and it even utilizes fun, young web 2.0 applications such as Flickr and YouTube. Barack even has a blog going; Hillary has yet to launch her's.

Clearly, although the look and feel of their respective homepages are similar, the content and its ensuing layout are decidedly different, reflecting the personal styles, target audiences, and strategies of each candidate. Conversely, the website of the other democrat in the race, John Edwards, is quite different. The design, color palette, and layout are distinctly different from his other contenders and he seems to have a lot more features going on on his site. His site boasts a search feature which the others don't, he has a video blog, audio blog, photo blog, and traditional blog which most of his family seem to contribute to, his site is multi-lingual (available in Spanish as well), and he utilizes more web 2.0 applications including MySpace, and social tagging (Digg, Del.icio.us, etc.).

It is quite interesting. The look and feel and overall user experience of each of these respective sites is quite different and tell different stories. The boys in the race definitely have a head start in the use of new age web features; whereas, Hillary's probably provides a more streamlined UX but is seemingly less content rich. No prognosticating nor biases here but I wonder if it's possible to tell who will win based solely on their respective sites. Could a Site Ratings feature aid in determining who will win the race?!

Incidently, they all use multimedia, specifically, online video, quite heavily. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, attend the WebGuild's Online Video event tomorrow at the Googleplex. See you there!