Monday, March 29, 2010

Has the French Elysée copied the US White House with its new website?

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...