I've got the onerous task of sending feedback to McCain and Obama through their contact webforms for a project I'm working on, and found it interesting the different tact the two of them have taken on their websites.

John McCain

The URL, http://johnmccain.com/Contact/ annoys the crap out of me because it's got a capitol C in contact. The web isn't totally case sensitive, but I feel strongly that URLs should be lowercase. This website is coreygilmore.com, not CoreyGilmore.com. The URL does work with a lowercase 'c' in contact, a benefit of hosting on Windows.

McCain's contact page is simple. Damn simple. There's a phone number (hey, it ends in 2008 and this is the 2008 election!), an address and a very simple form. John McCain doesn't care where you live, just how to reach you.There are four choices for the message subject; General Question, Donation Question, Website Question or Tell us about an an event.

What this is saying:

• General Question - Are you crazy and being watched by hidden cameras? This is the spot for you.
• Donation Question - Let us help you figure out how to give us money
• Website Question - Does our website not let you give us money?
• Tell us about an event - Where can we send campaign staff ask a large group of people for money?

It is a very simple page, almost blunt in its presentation. It looks like a one-off of nearly any contact form you'd find on a company's website.

Barack Obama

Obama's contact page is actually several separate pages. The main URL, http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/contact/ suffers from CMSitis. We know it's a page, and yes it's content, but let's throw that cruft in the URL anyways. http://barackobama.com/contact/ does redirect to the proper content page, but http://my.barackobama.com/contact/ throws a 404 error.

The contact landing page offers you several choices: will Obama show up at my wedding/high school graduation/nephew's bar mitzvah/Elks club barbecue; can I interview Obama; I want to volunteer; and everything else. There's also and address and a phone number (guess what four digits it ends in).

On the general contact page your email, name and message are required, and you can optionally provide your address and phone number.

Obama doesn't want to know what the subject of your request is, he wants to know what your interest is. And what a list of interests. I'm not motivated enough to write something snarky for all of these, but in the interest of being non-partisan I'll throw a dollar sign next to the fundraising requests.

• Event Information
• A Policy Issue
• A Donation Inquiry - $
• An Obama Store Inquiry - $
• Hosting an Event - $
• Website Suggestions - partial $
• Reporting a Problem with the Website - $
• Sending a Message to Michelle Obama - ♀
• Making a comment

Breaking it down

The most obvious reason for the differences between the two sites would be that McCain's strategy folks haven't had a hand in his contact page and it was done by web developers who don't have any vision. I assume this is the case. If not, it raises questions that should be discussed in political junkie forums elsewhere.

Obama's page shows more consistency between the contact form and main site - it's on message. Asking about policy is saying "We want to involve you in decisions about the country". The option to send a message to his wife is humanizing and reaches out to women voters. You're not presented with the sterile "Website Question", instead help us out, report a problem with the website.

I wouldn't say it demonstrates an inordinate attention to detail by Obama's staff, but it's an interesting oversight by the McCain campaign and I'd be curious to see the traffic the two candidate's contact pages receives; both relative to the rest of their sites and to one another. Perhaps no one uses McCain's contact page and the blandness doesn't matter.

Does anyone from a big metrics company like Hitwise or Compete want to share these numbers?