EricByers.com

The web is finally in it's prime. Sure presidential candidates in 2004 had web sites, but it was more of a "because we have to" thing. This election season brings an impressive edition to the web, with both candidates running video (including YouTube), twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and personal blogs just to name a few. While each campaign employees thousands of employees, in my estimation at least a hundred or more probably work directly or very close to their websites. It's really an impressive feat when essentially two giant companies assemble out of nowhere, with the full knowledge only one "company" is going to be around in a year or so.

Here are the sites/data in question (you may have to click in to the main site, past the video/donate splash pages).:
http://www.barackobama.com/
http://www.johnmccain.com/

Size of Page
bo.com - 2mb (2,000+ kb)
jm.com - 970kb

YSlow score: (A Yahoo! utility that checks for a variety of best practices)
bo.com - 53 (Grade F)
jm.com - 47 (Grade F)

Page load time (with cache disabled)
bo.com - 4.5 seconds
jm.com - 5 seconds

Page load time (after initial load, allowing for cached items)
bo.com - 3.5 seconds
jm.com - 2.5 seconds

So from this evidence it would suggest that John McCain's site is better. However, in side by side testing Barack Obama's site just feel's snappier. The reason, I believe, is that Barack's team did a much better job of optimizing their site. They put needed JavaScript/CSS files at the top of the page and used gzip (on the fly compression for faster transfers). This allows the page to render quicker, and the heft of the page (videos, etc) to load after, allowing the page to be useful earlier (which really makes the page load stats above worthless). The Barack site also utilizes expires headers, which allow the browser to use a cached version instead of having to load it from the site each time.

The one thing that both campaigns are missing is what is called minimizing or "min'ing" This basically rips all the whitespace and comments out of the JavaScript (which is passed to your computer), changes variable names to shorter ones, among other things. This "min'ing" can also be applied to CSS and HTML.

Overall I'm very impressed with the depth and data that is available on both campaign's site. Barack gets the slight web savvy edge nod (even if it is slightly anecdotal), but both sites could use an extra bit of polish.