There seems to be plenty of critiques [1] of this year’s presidential candidate websites. Here’s something I noticed for myself.
While I was looking for Hillary’s and Obama’s speeches from last week [2], I observed that Clinton’s site was smaller than Obama’s in width! At where I work [3], we have been targeting 1024×768 for quite some time. Obama’s site seems to fit that resolution, and Clinton’s, while bigger than the next smaller threshold of 800×600, was considerably smaller — about 100 pixels narrower than Obama’s.
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The difference of 100 pixels makes Clinton’s site look just a bit more crammed and busy than her rival’s. BarackObama.com, by comparison, benefits from the extra white space by communicating (at least to me) a sense of confidence.
So it got me curious — I went to the two other remaining candidates’ websites.
JohnMcCain.com: Black? You really went with black for your background color? Anyway, the screen resolution is even bigger than Barack’s. Guess we know who the real man is!
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And here’s the punchline… Mike Huckabee’s site targets 800×600! Over a year ago, it was reported that only 17% of all monitors support up to 800×600. [8] It says something about how mainstream this guy is aspiring to get, huh?
Yummy for Obama, crummy for Huckabee! And if Obama and McCain win nominations for their respective party, you know their websites’ size really mattered.