Presidential candidate web design review
February 5th, 2008 by Dustin Brewer
When it comes to voting for the future president of the United States, or even for the primary election to choose which candidate your party will choose, the decision can be difficult. There is health care, the war in Iraq and the economy amongst major issues for the 2008 presidential election. One of the major issues probably isn’t whether their web site’s design looks good or has valid code. However, most of us visiting this web site are probably at least curious. I know I am. I would totally run a poll to see who thought which web site’s design was best amongst the presidential candidates— but we all already know who has an obsessed and loyal following on the internet. Needless to say, the results would be a little skewed.
Barack Obama
Out of all of the designs amongst the presidential candidates I think that the Obama design is the best of the lot. I think it is extremely clean, soft and modern— maybe even a little edgy. The design looks good and they are using PHP and XHTML 1.0 transitional which is a pretty good move. Not the best move, of course. Strict would always be better. The site is cross-browser compliant though which is a huge plus. I think Obama wins out for overall design by a longshot.
Technology:
- 148 errors on XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- Table-less CSS
- RSS feed
- PHP / PWS 1.2
- 422KB / 764 Lines of code
Hillary Clinton
This design is pretty safe with a very web 2.0 feel, which isn’t a bad thing but it might a little overboard on the web 2.0 design for me to call it the best design. Overall it is a pretty good site, it does fall short with the doctype being HTML 4.01 Transitional though. It doesn’t use tables though, which is great. The site is also very easy to navigate, the drop downs are a little much but overall everything is pretty easy to find on the site.
Technology:
- 17 errors on HTML 4.01 Transitional
- Table-less CSS
- RSS feed
- ASP / IIS
- 251kb / 715 Lines of code
Ron Paul
I’m not a very big fan of this design, I don’t think it was done very well. It is very usable but overall I think that it could have been done much better with a little extra effort. This site actually should validate, it looks like the 1 error on the page was accidental as it is just a duplicated ID. So this site would be more standards compliant then most of the other sites on this list. It still uses the Transiitional XHTML doctype, but it would only have 4 minor errors if the doctype were changed to XHTML Strict. Overall, as to be expect, the site is pretty well maintained and uses a good combination of technologies. I did have some issues with the site though, there were several instances when the JavaScript on this site was causing my browser (Firefox 2) to nearly stop working. Once I had closed out of the site everything was back to normal though.
Technology:
- 1 error on XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- Table-less CSS
- RSS feed
- Apache / PHP
- 464kb / 608 Lines of code
Mitt Romney
This site looks great, it is well organized and is easily navigated. The site uses CSS without any tables, loads fast and even runs on an Apache server. The only problem I have is with the logo, it reminds me of the US Postal Service. The website works cross browsers and overall functions pretty well.
Technology:
- 52 errors on XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- Table-less CSS
- RSS feed
- Apache / PHP
- 454kb / 511 Lines of code
Mike Huckabee
I think this is the worstly designed site out of the bunch, it is very squished and lacks that professional aspect that some of the others sites portray. Even the logo is kearned too much. I think the elements on the site looks very amateurish and deserve some serious attention. The navigation looks fine but I’m not sure that the rest of the site was properly planned out. It isn’t a horribly designed site, I’m sure I’ve sent out some similar caliber sites myself. It doesn’t say “I’m going to be the next President” though. Which looks like may very well be the case.
Technology:
- 30 errors on XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- Table-less CSS
- RSS feed
- ASP / IIS
- 320kb / 345 Lines of code
John McCain
Ah, yes. Now McCain. This is a website? Really? Huh. According to modern browsers, it is not infact a website. There is no doctype on this site, it barely uses CSS and is completely tabled. This site even has spacer gifs, it looks like it was exported directly out of photoshop without even naming the slices. It uses ampersand spaces all over the place to organize things and there isn’t a single LI or P tag on the page. Not to mention it appears to be a direct rip of Mitt Romney’s site, they layouts are almost identical. The only reason I suggest that McCain’s is the rip off is because of the lack of effort put into the code on this site. Tables? Spacer gifs? No doctype? If I were grading these I think McCain would get an F.
Technology:
- 77 errors in quirks mode (no doctype)
- Tables
- No RSS Feed
- ASP / IIS
- 852kb / 1481 Lines of code
Presidential Candidates web site design and coding overview
Taking a look at all of these sites there some some very big similarities between them, the biggest I noticed was the horizontal navigation bar along the top of the site. Even more they all seemed to have a very similar format, some a little too similar. I think that they all tried to carry a little of the web 2.0 feel to try and seem modern, but that may just be the designers behind the scenes carrying over what they like.
With this article I’m not saying you should choose any one of the candidates over the other based on their web site’s design and coding practices. It does give a little perspective to how they might run some of their business from the White House though. I think if anything is to be learned about this, the big one I would like to point out is that if you are looking for good decision to be made— Don’t expect them to come from a McCain administration. This site was the worst example of website design and the McCain campaign obviously didn’t care enough about the web site to put any real effort in making sure it was a good site. The McCain campaign is also the only candidate that didn’t have a link to other social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. They did, however, have a “McCain space” which is a big catastrophe— it isn’t related to MySpace.
What do you think about the candidates designs?
Popularity: 15%
February 5th, 2008
Interesting idea for a post Dustin. As far as looks go, they are all pretty similar. I guess red, white and blue are mandatory in their situation.
February 5th, 2008
Great post, I never thought about really LOOKING at their web sites. I agree, Barack Obama is the definite winner out of the lot. I’m just glad this wasn’t another Ron Paul article, I’m so tired of hearing about him.
February 5th, 2008
Only one error with Ron Paul’s website is impressive. Attention to details are critical.
February 6th, 2008
I feel I have to stand up for HTML 4.01 here. There really is no point in using an XHTML doctype if the page is still served as text/html. I know it’s not too difficult to implement content negotiation but why go through all the trouble when there is no notable benefit.
As far as the contest between these sites go, Obama is the clear winner.
By the way, what the heck is an “ampersand space”? Do you mean the entity? It’s actually called “non-breaking space”.
February 6th, 2008
Barack Obama clearly has the nicest looking one. Anyone know what company developed it?
February 6th, 2008
This gallery has been up for quite some time. You can vote for your favorite presidential candidate’s site: http://csshot.com/?cat=16
February 6th, 2008
Wonderfully detailed reviews. Thanks, Dustin.
February 6th, 2008
@Kmo: Thanks for the correction, not really sure what I was thinking when I used that phrase to describe it.
@JB: Thanks for the link, I had considered running a poll alongside this article but your gallery works just the same.
@Steven, Charles, Apple Pie?, Matthew: I’m glad you enjoyed the article!
February 6th, 2008
i think Obama’s site is the best too…
in downloading the CSS and then the imported CSS file, i saw a commented piece of code by the developer…
http://simplescott.com/
i take it they are the ones who developed his site although their site doesnt look like too much to speak of…
February 6th, 2008
I wish more people focused on the design choices made by the candidates. These choices are not superficial. Even those in the non-design community are influenced by things like color, font, tone, usability, etc., on the web and in print. Do we lean towards voting for someone with well-designed collateral, whether consciously or subconsciously? And is that a good way to vote?
February 6th, 2008
I think Barack Obama the good looking one the color and the user friendliness and nice color combination.
February 6th, 2008
I really enjoyed this article.
I full agree the McCain site is amusing.
February 7th, 2008
Has anyone noticed how each of the candidates seem to use the same style. All with top navigation & a left or right side navigation. Another thing to consider these candidates want to make sure no one is left out even if they are using Netscape 4. That & they are all designed by their campaigns. I bet half don’t even know whats on their website.
February 7th, 2008
interesting article, thanks for reviews
February 8th, 2008
Great Post, Love it.
February 8th, 2008
Who cares? You nitpick the wrong features of the sites - the code doesn’t matter these days as much as the presentation.
February 8th, 2008
What a cool idea for a post! Thanks for putting all of this information on one page. Interesting!
February 9th, 2008
[…] Presidential Candidate Web Design Review from Dustin Brewer. […]
February 9th, 2008
They should have used Plone :-)
February 11th, 2008
[…] Pew Study shows only 8 percent of Americans are visiting candidates’ Web sites, no matter how snazzy, choosing “unbiased” forums to get their information (or satire sites!) Sites such as […]
February 11th, 2008
This page on DustinBrewer.com
Technology:
* 2 errors on XHTML 1.0 Strict!
* Table-less CSS
* RSS Feed
* Apache / PHP / WordPress
* 295kb / 639 Lines of code (HTML)
February 11th, 2008
Thanks for the technology profile Ted, I corrected those 2 errors. It looks like when I added the dzone plugin their javascript was malformed.
February 12th, 2008
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February 12th, 2008
[…] you are responding to this post due to a incoming link I sent to your site in this post I want to thank you for taking the time to come over and read what I have to say. […]
February 13th, 2008
It shouldn’t matter at all if they used HTML 4 transitional/strict vs. XHTML 1 transitional/strict. Why? Because *both* are W3C recommendations and primarily comes down to your personal preference as a developer for serving up the document.
HTML 4 transitional/strict is much more appropriate if you are sending a “Content-type: text/html” from your web-app. XHTML 1 transitional/strict is much more appropriate if you are going to be serving it as “Content-type: application/xhtml+xml”.
But, seeing as how a majority of the users haven’t caught up with us yet - 80% of them will be using browsers that will only accept text/html. The majority of developers are pretty ignorant about this as well…
So, it really comes down to preference and proper headers; I prefer XHTML 1 strict and always detect for accepted content types in the user-agent; serving the proper header in response.
PHP code to do so should look something like this:
$content_type = preg_match(‘/application\/xhtml\+xml/i’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_ACCEPT’]) ? ‘application/xhtml+xml’ : ‘text/html’;
header(“Content-type: $content_type; charset=UTF-8”);
Don’t forget you have to set the proper content type within your meta-tag as well… You could easily slip that $content_type into a constant within your templates…
February 13th, 2008
An F for not including the document type definition?
Seriously, this whole thing with open source nerds is getting way out of hand.
You have truly forgotten your ways. You are lost. THINK! Think, what is the reason Web exists… To share information. And that information is available to users with or without a doctype.
You’re making the code the idea itself, when it’s only the means to distribute information in a nice fashion.
Shame on you. I give you an F for being such a stereotypical open source fanatic, who is irreversibly lost.
February 13th, 2008
I’m sorry, open source fanatic? A standardista, yeah— guilty as charged. But open source fanatic? That doesn’t even make sense with the context of this article. Perhaps I am missing something? A doctype is a W3c recommendation (standard) to tell browsers what kind of HTML you are using; hasn’t much to do with open source, it is about quality of code.
February 13th, 2008
I agree with Parnell. Downgrading a site because it uses HTML4 instead of XHTML?
What has XHTML to offer over HTML4? Nothing. It gets even worse, HTML4 has so much more to offer than any XHTML ever will. Don’t fall in the XML hype just like that. XML wasn’t mend to render websites. It’s supposed to be a data transporter. What will you do when there’s HTML5? Will you translate your page to it and start bugging sites that still use XHTML?
February 13th, 2008
Also, you’re giving points for PHP? For godsake why? It’s terribly slow if you compare it to other type of scripting languages like Perl or Ruby. And not just because it’s a slow interpreter, but most of the times your scripts will be bigger in size(kbytes). A web server needs to read that file, and no matter what, a bigger file needs more time to load than a smaller one.
But for me Obama has the best site, because blue is my favorite color and he has lots of blue.
February 15th, 2008
Hi,
interesting point of view .
I can say that there are to similar. But the Obama site has something important for Web 2.0 - simplicity , for Hillary too much red to many banners on first page - this can confuse things.
February 16th, 2008
[…] Presidential Candidate Web Design Review from Dustin Brewer. […]
February 17th, 2008
[…] Dustin Brewer, a web designer from Oklahoma, recently did a great job of reviewing all of the presidential candidates’ websites. […]
February 20th, 2008
[…] the similarities and the ‘mistakes’ from a design perspective. You might want to take a look at http://dustinbrewer.com/presidential-candidate-web-design-review/ […]
February 23rd, 2008
Umm did u really write this and if u did someone is ripping your content. http://davidwalsh.name/judging-candidates-based-website/
February 23rd, 2008
He didn’t necessarily copy me, looks like he was just inspired by this article to write a similar article and come to a different conclusion. Thanks for bringing it to my attention though.
February 24th, 2008
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March 9th, 2008
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April 30th, 2008
Great tips, love it very useful information & have scrutinize whole above deployed comments all their are very specific, i am glad & these sort of sounded good to me, to make web sites as user & search engine friendly.
June 25th, 2008
IF we can make some resume based and on Candidates results the Obama web site is the winner
it’s look better and with more style.
Regards Dimi