Obama Wins (for his website)

The 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination process is being fiercely contested by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Both candidates are using the Internet to help their campaigns woo volunteers and campaign contributions. But who has the better Website?

Judges from the Web Marketing Association WebAwards have stated their opinion on the matter: Obama wins in all categories of Design, Innovation, Ease of Use, Content, Copywriting, Interactivity, and Technology. Such reviews are compatible with surveys that indicate Obama leads with mobilizing the younger generation.

The WebAward judging panel consists of web industry leaders in the international community. As a group they have submitted more than 18,000 site evaluations over the past decade as part of the annual WebAward Competition. Sherpa!'s Chief Experience Officer, David Felfoldi, has served on the panel for three consecutive years.

One quickly notes that the navigation of the sites appear the same -- the DONATE NOW/CONTRIBUTE buttons are the same color and placement. Even the language of video (candidateTV) is the same! But in the end, Barack seems to be doing a better job visually. There is much more use of white space, which results in homepage scrolling, but this works better than cramming all the content into the homepage like the Hillary site. Content-wise the websites appear similar just with a different candidate. Obama does seem to make more use of social media, but one has to wonder if it a case of name-dropping ("hey, I represent on MyBatanga!"). Interestingly, Hillary's "bilingual" page keeps navigation and a lot of the call to actions in English. No bueno. - David Felfoldi, Sherpa! Web Studios

The Web Marketing Association judges WebAward judges to review both www.hillaryclinton.com and www.barackobama.com used the same seven criteria as the annual WebAwards program.

Below are the numbers, or you can view pretty graphs.

Design: Obama - 74.8%; Clinton 25.2%

Innovation: Obama - 74.8%; Clinton 25.2%

Content: Obama - 65.7%; Clinton 34.3

Ease of use:: Obama - 57.5%; Clinton 42.5%

Copywriting: Obama - 60.8%; Clinton 39.2%

Interactivity: Obama - 64.8%; Clinton 35.2%

Technology Obama - 73.8%; Clinton 26.2%