Johanna Blakley (pictured),deputy director of USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center, was featured on the University of Southern California's Election 2008 blog for a feature titled "Web site face-off: McCain vs. Obama" in which she critiqued the presidential candidates' official Web sites.
Blakley doesn't offer opinions about which of Barack Obama or John McCain's sites are better, but points out numerous benefits and flaws in categories such as "look and feel," "branding," "interactivity," "unique features" and "bugs."
"They’ve got a candidate and a running mate with many marketable features that they have completely failed to distill into a compelling visual identity," she wrote about McCain's branding. "If I were McCain, I wouldn’t have settled for this."
She said Obama's site "is as buggy as they come."
"And simply logging in to the site can be a challenge: You have to enter your email and password before the Flash splash screen refreshes," she said. "Talk about uninviting."
Election 2008 is a special resource for journalists.
