I was having a conversation with one of our buddies at sister company Fox-Land yesterday about the recent New York Times article comparing Hillary Clinton to a PC where Obama is a Mac, the reference being drawn from a comparison of their respective website designs and what this in turn says about their campaign style as they try to win the democratic candidate nomination.  You can judge for yourself at hillaryclinton.com and barackobama.com what you think, but I can understand the comparisons and find it interesting that in the end such a potentially historic moment as a first black or female president is influenced by how people react to colours, shouty capitals, or cute icons.  John McCain’s website is worth looking at too… but they don’t talk about that.

“For all their flashy animations and quirky widgets, are agencies’ websites really giving visitors what they want?” 
The question asked by Campaign magazine’s recent article about adland’s fascination with flash based websites really struck a chord. One of our pet hates is the apparent belief that it’s not important that websites might be slow to load, poor to navigate, difficult to search within, because they’ll win you over with their style and, er… flashiness ?

John Morrish is absolutely right: “Visitors want information, and they want it within seconds, or they’ll go somewhere else.” Not withstanding the fact that they might not even get to the site in the first instance as it can be all but invisible to search engines. 

Mind you, flash can look cool as you like. Mmm – everything in moderation is I think how the saying goes.

View the full article here.