Behind the Candidates: who's working for your candidate?

Although I’m very political by nature (after all, I started my career at 16 as an environmental activist), I try not to go too deeply into politics in conversation with folks I don’t know well. It’s too likely to get heated, and personally, I’d rather talk about food and business and the like.

That said, I do spend a lot of time reading up on the candidates, getting informed and the like, and the other day I was pointed to this interesting site called Behind the Candidates, which is a breakdown of all the folks who are working in the campaigns of the two main presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain.

Overall, it’s pretty well designed. Clean, easy to read, and one key thing I like - it has nice big type so voters of all ages can read it without an issue (often a problem with modern websites). The one thing that gets me, though - they created a custom scrollbar in the center of the page, rather than letting the page scroll on the right like it normally would.

The benefit to this, on one hand, is that it forces you to think for a moment - which, presumably, is part of what the site is meant to do. On the other hand, it also makes an assumption that the person visiting this site has all the time in the world to peruse through the multiple mini-profiles. It’s clunky to use, and since I, like most folks, was checking this site out in my *ahem* copious spare time, I barely got through a couple dozen profiles before I had to move on.

Personally, I’d have left the scrollbar where it was - where people expect it to be. Aside from that, a nice clean design, and well-organized information.

Don’t forget to vote tomorrow!