The Harper and Obama Websites: One Voice or Many?

I’ve been looking at the Government of Canada portal and Prime Minister Harper’s website as well as the White House portal. The differences between the US and Canadian sites are dramatic.

In a word, the essence of the Canadian sites is political messaging, and the message is all about Stephen Harper. Both the Canada portal and the PM’s site have three columns, and the eye is drawn to the top of the middle column - the widest column - which contains news stories almost always featuring the photogenic (or not) Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister’s site has the news of the day dominating the central column, priorities and utilities in the left column and video and audio in the right column. Today, there are 7 - count ‘em 7 - photos of the Prime Minister on the site (including the banner and all three columns).

The left column of the Canada site includes links to services, other aspects of governance (Supreme Court, Parliament), and utilities, while the right column links to priorities (currently the Economic Action Plan, Haiti, the Olympics, and armed forces recruitment). Links to popular services are below the story of the day in the middle column.

The Canadian sites do not occupy the full screen width-wise, but have well-defined left and right borders and leave considerable space in the margins beyond the borders. The implicit message is of focus and concentration.

Now let’s shift over to whitehouse.gov. President Obama is at the top, with links to four rotating videos, today including the State of the Union address and the announcement of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. The weekly video address - the online successor of the Saturday radio address - is one of the four during weekends and early in the week.

The site also has three columns, but they play out very differently than those on the Canadian sites. The right column contains priorities (Haiti, economic recovery, and the flu) and the middle column legislative proposals, with Health Care now at the top. The bottom of the page contains five columns of links, including issues, the briefing room, and background about the President and the White House. The extensive links at the bottom drive the site to cover the entire screen width-wise. As a consequence, the three columns in the middle of the page have considerable space and don’t seem cluttered, even though they are full of content.

The most distinctive feature of the White House site is the blog, which occupies the left column. It deals with a variety of policy and management issues Videos are presented, and posts authored by, a variety of administration officials including department secretaries, agency heads, and White House and agency staff. The main White House blog expands to nine sub-blogs including the middle class task force, the office of citizen engagement, open government, and partnerships.

While the White House site itself does not host consultations, the posts on the blog take you outside it to numerous consultations hosted on social networking sites (the response to the State of the Union address on Facebook) or departmental websites (a consultation on high speed rail on the Department of Transportation site). The open government blog leads to the Administration’s path-breaking initiative (data.gov) to make government datasets available - gratis - for citizen users, including software developers.

In effect, whitehouse.gov has become the administration’s high profile consultation portal. In contrast, the federal government’s consultation portal (consultingcanadians.gc.ca) is somewhere out there in Government of Canada cyberspace, but lacks a high-profile link to the Canada portal.

Think of the rubric “Obama Administration.” Putting the emphasis on Obama calls up the image of the embattled President, winning some battles with Congress (Bernanke’s confirmation), losing others (the deficit reduction panel), and with others still in the balance (health care legislation). Putting the emphasis on Administration evokes an image of the departments launching a host of initiatives: a vision of widespread creativity in governance. On the White House site, the embattled President rests atop the creative Administration, with the latter launching many new initiatives and consulting widely about them. It’s a portal of many voices, and it is the diversity (and occasional cacophony) of voices that makes it a far more exciting place than its Canadian counterpart.