If you’ve been living anywhere but under a rock you’ve been surrounded by the press and the candidates giving you their best pitch for why they want to be president. I’ve decided to evaluate their main campaign web sites and decide who gets the best score for: information architecture, usability and graphic design. All categories are rated 1-10.

All reviews were done the day after the Iowa Caucus

Candidate IA U G D Notes Total
Democrats
Barak Obama 8 5 9 Exellent design and layout. although the Javascript menus didn’t work well in Firefox (Barak you won the youth vote, don’t forget about FF and Safari.) 22
John Edwards 5 6 6 Odd looking back and white splash page. I’m still trying to figure out the tone here but it sure doen’t “feel” presidential. 17
Hillary Clinton 9 7 8 Very well organized site excellent IA . I’m giving her a 7 since she has a serious “scroll block” issue on the home page. 24
Republicans
Mike Huckabee 4 6 5 I know Mike doesn’t have as much dough as the other candidates which is reflected on his site. The red, white, blue, green, brown color scheme is rough. 15
Mitt Romney 7 6 6 Overall the site is too dark. Too much use of grey. Same FireFox issue with the navigation. Scroll block on the homepage as well as an odd video splash page the first time I visited (kudos for not showing it again on return) 19
John McCain 7 8 6 Again, a bitt too dark for an optimistic message. The IA is decent. 21

Hillary wins the website review with 24 points.

Interesting observations: First all these sites placed the “contribute” link in the upper right corner. Very good location for findability but also where the mental model of the shopping cart ($$) is, coincidental? Second, each site has way too much information. If they are trying to attract the media for an audience then this is great. But if you’re trying to sway an undecided voter they should be more concise with the information. Last, a few of the sites were guilty of “scroll block” this is usually caused by a horizontal line (or image or text) to span the entire page leading the user to think they have reached the bottom.