Bremsstrahlung

I registered and voted early today to get it out of the way before the official election date on Tuesday. In the course of deciding for which presidential candidate to vote, I looked at the websites of both Barack Obama and John McCain. While doing so I noticed a number of points, which I tried not to allow to influence my decision, but which seemed interesting.

• Obama's Site has a stupid splash screen that stops you before you get to the main page.
• McCain's site has an annoying video on most of the major pages which plays automatically, but which wasn't difficult to stop.
• Obama's site did something with flash that crashed my web-browser twice.
• McCain's site had far fewer categories for issues than Obama's.

The overall tone of the sites was also very different. Frankly, McCain's appealed to me far more, as it was a straightforward compilation of his arguments for his suitability as president and his plans if elected. Obama's site struck me as rather arrogant, really, with it's assumption that the viewer is already a supporter who needs to be given means to selflessly devote his energy to the cause, rather than an intelligent voter seeking information about the cadidate. The information is there, it's just not what's pushed toward the visitor. That splash screen? "Volunteer Near You". Also the site design seemed rather more busy and cluttered, making it more annoying to navigate.

All of the above being said, I do not think that website design is a basis on which to select the president; after all neither candidate sat down and coded his own website and really they have more important things to think about. What did influence by decision was the realization that I had to hunt quite carefully to actually find significant differences between the two candidate's platforms. In the end I don't see why other people are working themselves up into such a lather over this¹; I'll be content with which ever of the two wins.