While political scientists continue to conduct their postmortems on exactly why and how Illinois Senator Barack Obama became President-elect Barack Obama, one thing is clear: the power of Obama’s campaign Web site was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

It comes as no surprise, then, that many politicians here in California are creating campaign Web sites modeled after Obama's, mimicking both the style and the function of BarackObama.com.

"A lot of the sites you see for campaigns are inspired by the Obama site," said Steve Thompson of Poised, a web development company hired by Los Angeles City Attorney candidate Carmen Trutanich. "Campaign sites never used to have a lot of interactivity. That's the main feature we tried to implement from the Obama site. Getting people to interact with the Web site is the underlying goal."

Trutanich's campaign site also has a very similar appearance to Obama's Web site. While Thompson would not elaborate on the site's ascetics, other web developers say the parallels with Obama's homepage were no accident.

"Similarity is a big thing," Ed Grefawetz of Web Politechs, the company that created Los Angeles City Council candidate Paul Koretz's campaign site, said. "If you had an Obama volunteer who really understood what was going on, he can go to this other Web site and he's already familiar with the way it works."

California Democrats are not the only ones looking to recreate the Obama campaign's internet success. Assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine), a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010, is hoping to use the internet to spur a grassroots movement online similar to the one that carried Obama to victory.

"We'll be building our own brand of websites and blogs and various viral efforts," Justin Hart, director of new media for the DeVore campaign, said.

However, you need the right candidate to attract people to your Web site, Grefawetz argued.

"It won't work the same for all candidates," Grefawetz said. "You have to have a candidate that caters to that younger crowd that uses technology. And you have to have somebody who is motivational enough that people want to belong to these things in an active way."

Hart agreed that the success of Obama's Web site and the movement behind it was dependent on both the candidate and the environment.

"It's difficult to recreate the conditions that gave rise to that movement," Hart said. "You kind of have to have the right candidate at the right moment with the right message. We're not saying we can duplicate that, but we hope to have a lot of the same elements."