A team of researchers out of Bentley College, Christine Williams an Jeff Gulati (we’ve covered their analysis of Facebook and elections a couple of times) have released a new content study that shows that the “presidential candidates who have the ‘most comprehensive and innovative websites have also raised the most money.” While helpfully adding to our body of knowledge about the candidates’ use of the web, the study raises more questions than it answers.

Williams and Gulati looked at the websites for all 20 declared Republican and Democratic candidates and find that, “the surprise is not the bare bones, undeveloped sites, but the depth and sophistication of so many sites this early in the campaign. And these presidential candidates’ websites are much more interactive than the Congressional sites we studied in 2006.”

The purpose of the study is to target the candidates' use of the web, and how it correlates to fundraising. Williams and Gulati are looking for specific innovations like blogging, RSS feeds, use of social networks, email, and splash pages (?) on each site to help them assess the site’s interactive and creative value. Their results are:

• Sixteen of the 20 candidates have a blog and nearly all allow visitor posts.
• Fifteen of the candidates link to one and usually several social networks; two without links allow visitors to join a social network on the candidate’s own site.
• Thirteen of the candidates provide message boxes for entering a custom or prepared message to e-mail friends encouraging their support or contributions; a few allow the sender to track their responses.
• Six candidates currently offer RSS feeds.
• Five candidates have used splash pages as introductory covers before entering their sites.

The study shows that many candidates are at least paying lip service to technologies that were just getting their start during the last cycle, though some candidates are clearing using technologies more and better than others. And while there is a “huge variation” in the ways that candidates are employing blogs, “in contrast to how most candidates managed their blogs in 2004 and 2006, current blogs are more open and participatory,” say Williams and Gulati.

Also, the study notes that many of the candidates have invested energy in different features, with John Edwards building out an extensive blog, and offering live chats and group-building; Barack Obama and John McCain offering social-networking tools; and Mitt Romney focusing on video with his Mitt TV.

If you’re wondering how the researchers define “comprehensive and innovative,” “interactive,” or “most creative” (another of the study’s descriptors), you’re not alone. And while a few sites may indeed be deep and sophisticated, many more fail to properly take advantage of the many tools the web makes available. TechPresident bloggers David All and Mike Turk have been consistently bemoaning the Republican candidates' use of the web compared to the Democrats, and there are Democrats as well who have not nearly exploited the web's potential.

It's true that, compared to 2004, the majority of candidates are taking much more advantage of the web, but I fear that this study raises too rosy a picture of their collective efforts. There’s such a wide discrepancy between, say, the efforts of Rudy Giuliani and Barack Obama (or pretty much any Republican besides John McCain and the “big three” Democrats), that a more essential comparison and critique is getting lost by simply comparing today’s web sites to those from three years ago.

Missing from the study is a clear indicator of what the “most creative” web sites were and how that creativity lined up with online donations. While this kind of comparison is no simple task, it would ultimately make the study more valuable.