I saw once a blogger who compared the technologies used by to political rivals to build their website. I'm still not sure about the relevance of the exercise, I'm 100% sure that neither McCain nor Obama knows a shit about HTML .. OK maybe Obama does. Anyway, they most likely have better things to do than choosing which technologies they will use on their website.

So what does it tell us exactly ?

Well, It tell us with what kind of collaborators they make business. And this can be an interesting thing to know.

Why ? Well, if we compare two websites and one is using only widespread open source technologies while the other uses solely paid (or pirated) softwares, we can deduce that the later might have more money than the former.

Or it can also mean that the one using open source softwares is more tech savvy and invest his money more wisely.

It can mean a lot of things, but I'll let it up to my readers to draw their own conclusions.

So let's see what technologies used McCain and Obama , while they are in their last man standing race.

Unfortunately, McCain's server was less keen to let me know what's in its hood. But I'm pretty sure it's running Windows since it serves ASP. If you find more tell me, I'll be glad to add or correct it.

Moreover, I felt the Obama website felt a lot more professional in therm of design. The color harmonies are good, the designer got "out of the box" while staying sober. The images are carefully crafted, with the right compression and there is not a single color clashes with the design. Also the layout as well proportioned for most screen size, it's fluent and as sufficient spacing to allow comfortable reading. Mostly everything is consistent, the colors, the layout, the font-size, the document structure. It's a great web site.

Contrastingly, the McCain website is not very good looking. It's pretty heavy and bold. The left column makes feels like cheap advertisement and the right one has the design caliber of a MySpace page. The content is cluttered and looks like an all dressed pizza. It's an average site at best. Let's stand back and visualize what I mean;

One good point for McCain: his website was more printer friendly. I didn't actually print it, I used FF3's print preview.

Still, Obama would win my vote for sure on the design/technologies aspects.

Politically biased note:

One last thing hit me: the tagline(s). On the marketing aspect Obama has also the win, on his website there is some nicely worded taglines clycled along with images or illustrations. McCain as only one tagline: "Country First" accompanied with a stoic photo of himself.

Also I think this kind of short imperative sentence can be dangerous because beside having a broad and vague meaning, it tend to remind the black and white Republican's dogmas. The kind of "you're with us or against us" phrase that Bush once said.