At midnight on Sunday, the new website of the French Presidency -
www.elysee.fr - went live, but does it not look remarkably similar to the website of the Obama administration on the official White House website at
www.whitehouse.gov?

The world-recognised
logos are at the top of the page in the centre sitting upon identical
horizontal blue menu bars and
interactive image and text sections that scroll through a cycle of the latest uploaded pages.

But the similarities do not stop there; both sites are arranged identically across
three columns, are set upon a
white background with a faint image of a building, have full
shareability via the social networks and have
comprehensive site-maps at the foot of each homepage.

According to Le Figaro, the French site's webmaster admitted the site costed
€100,000 to make - which to me seems a lot for a copy-paste job. But perhaps this is just another bold statement that France, and President Nicolas Sarkozy in particular, wants to be more like Barack Obama and have as much success...