A few months ago, the media spent some time scrutinizing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s websites and ultimately came to a conclusion best summed up by The New York Times, which asked, “Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?” The gist of it all was that Obama’s site seemed clean, fresh, new, trendy, and generally NOT awful. Clinton’s corner of the web, however, felt mired in the old aesthetics of the Internet: cluttered, busy, overwhelming, and unpleasant in many, many ways.

That was in February though. Now it’s mid-April. How do these two sites stack up these days?

First, let’s look at the introductory pages for each. Obama’s is lush, soft, and blue — kind of like a really cool aquarium. At its center is a charming, grayscale photo of him with his family, his kids crawling all over him in a joyous way. The whole image is warm and inviting, bordering on mildly artistic (thanks to the black and white). Too bad Michelle Obama looks royally pissed off, as if she’s about to say, “I have to get down here and take another photo? How many damn shots do we need?” Minor quibble, really.

If Obama’s intro page is soft and welcoming, Hillary Clinton’s is the equivalent of someone driving a Mack truck through your front door. It’s bold, brash, and a bit jarring. The first thing we see is a giant Hillary head looking off in some nondescript direction. It’s supposed to be the aloof transcendence of a powerful leader, but in reality, the picture tells us nothing. Whereas the Obama photo portrays an image of a folksy family man in the classic mold, Hillary’s portrait just screams “LOOK AT MY BIG FACE.”

Making matters worse is the shoddy graphic design around her logo. The nifty little flag that waves under her name is egregiously pixilated, a major no-no on a professional, let alone presidential website. I mean, have her people ever even heard of anti-aliasing? And then there’s her slogan, “Help Make History.” The (similarly anti-aliased) letters are outlined in white. Ouch. Very ouch. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Photoshop knows that the best way to make elements “pop” is not to use a white outline, but black. Or at the very least, use a drop shadow. A drop shadow, people! One has to question the judgment of whoever hired these graphic designers.

After clicking through their introductions, both sites take us to their main pages — the all-important navigational hubs from which further exploration emanates. Obama’s site continues its aquatic blue theme, as soft shades of the color permeate seemingly every corner of the site. There’s also a good amount of white, with occasional red accents here and there to punctuate important links (ie. “Donate Now”). To be fair, while the site’s aesthetic does speak to the glossy professionalism now seen on the Web, the designers clearly went overboard with the white haze. There’s so much soft filter on this page that I half expect Barbara Walters to pop up at any given moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah — I get that it’s supposed to connote some sort of “visionary light,” but the whole thing looks like it’s being viewed from the base of a Niagara Falls. Dial it back a tad, Obama.

In stark, stark contrast to this is Hillary Clinton’s site, which continues to be one of the Internet’s most unholy eyesores. “Busy” would be an understatement. The site is absolutely cluttered with text, colors, boxes, numbers, and small pictures. There is no rhyme or reason to any of it either. Whereas Obama’s site maintained a diligent, smart color scheme, Clinton’s is full of discordant blues and reds and whites and yellows (?) and grays (???). Too much. TOO MUCH. Plus, there seems to be an effort to cram as much information as possible into the page. I understand the impulse to offer viewers as many reading options as possible, but there is such a thing as overkill. By forcing so much stuff into such a small space, the designers must contend with smaller text, less white space, and a generally cluttered look. It’s kind of like taking everything in the Louvre and shoving it into one big room. Yeah, there’s noteworthy stuff to see, but who would want to bother at that point? Doesn’t she realize that Americans are lazy? We want BIG pictures, minimal text. Not small pictures, and TONS OF TEXT.

It’s bad enough that buttons litter the right hand side of Hillary’s page, stacked on each other like the tacky Internet ads from 1999, but what makes matters worse is all the completely unnecessary text. A link in the middle of the page reads “Get Campaign Text Messages.” Okay, makes sense. But then under that, there are three lines that say, “Sign up to receive Hillary updates via text message and stay on top of the latest campaign news.” Really? Did they really need to clutter up the main page with that? They might as well have written, “Blah blah blah blah blah REDUNDANT.”

As for the rest of her site, Hillary continues to be plagued by poor design choices. Click on her “Issues” tab, and you’ll be taken to page after page of text that is not only dry, but also difficult to read. To be fair, Obama’s equivalent pages are also similarly uninspired in the design department, but at least his people have the good sense to employ some white space here and there. Clinton just gives us one giant block of text after another. Groan.

Poor Hill-dawg. Her site’s truly a mess. It’s fairly obvious that her people have done nothing to revamp it since the Times article. You’d think they’d give it at least a perfunctory touch-up, but I guess sometimes, change can be a bit hard to embrace.

– Ben Mandelker