First of all, Obama just plain covers more issues that Clinton: 21 vs. 14. Clinton has no technology section. Even Obama’s “Additional Issues” section covers some important points missed by Clinton. In this section Obama specifically covers dealing with the hurricane Katrina tragedy. (Although, to Clinton’s credit, via a google search I did find an article on hurricane Katrina policy, but it’s just not listed in the issues menu.)

Second of all, compare the language/IA of the menu itself– Clinton’s is so contrived and superficial. The menu items aren’t even consistent in tense, tone, and style. Some of the items describe what she is going to do (“Strengthening the Middle Class”), others describe what content is linked to (“An Innovation Agenda”), and then there’s an item that just says who/what Clinton is (“A Champion for Women”). This “sentence” style, and the fact that the sentences aren’t even in a consitent style, makes the information much more difficult to navigate. It’s as if the website architects forgot that they were making a menu for users to access content, and just took every opportunity to communicate the perfect “message” whenever and wherever they had the attention of a voter, at the cost of making the information easy to access in the first place.

Obama’s menu is very well done– it’s extremely clear what each item links to. Users who are looking for the platform for a particular issue can find it very quickly, and users just perusing the website see a very accessible and comprehensible top-level list of issues. In fact, the items in the menu are in alphabetical order! Be still, my beating heart!

Obama’s menu says “Education”; Clinton’s: “Improving Our Schools”. You almost don’t have to click on Clinton’s– why read her plan when she already told you: when she is president the schools are getting more better. If you do click through, you will find that Obama has about twice as much content on his page, plus links to pdfs with much more detail on subtopics. Clinton’s page does have a “Hillary’s Plans” section on the upper right, but this is a list of links to a hodge-podge of feature articles and press releasees and is not done in the thoughtful and consistently-organized platform presentation of Obama’s website.