Update: over the course of the election my opinion on Feschuk’s writing flipped 180 degrees and its clear to me that I ought to have let him spit out a few more words before judging him. While I doubt he swayed many voters, his pieces were a refreshing change from the typical election banter. +1 for Mr. Feschuk, -1 to me for overlooking the value of humour.
What is probably the first web gaffe of the campaign, this ‘feature’ on the Liberal site presents a classic lesson in how not to pretend you know about blogging:
Throughout the campaign, Scott Feschuk â chief speechwriter to Paul Martin â will be filing reports from the road using his Blackberry, a wireless handheld device that enables political staffers to stay in touch, instantly communicate with the media and develop freakish, superstrong thumbs with which they can crush most European sedans. Respond to Scott’s blog at sfeschuk@liberal.ca. Link to blog, while it remains…
Most bloggers will find these examples insulting to their intelligence; web readers who aren’t clued into blogging will figure the Liberals have indeed gone off the deep end:
11:27 AM – Well, we’re off and running. Running hard! Well, technically speaking, most of us walked to 24 Sussex from Rideau Hall. Me, I waddled. But I’m a team player: I waddled hard. Now we’re talking about speeches: the PM apparently wants to give some. He’s completely resisting my strong advice that he express his vision for the country through interpretive dance.
… or…
6:36 AM – Wow, look at me! I’m in “cyberspace,” where no one can hear you scream. Or maybe they CAN hear you scream but they don’t pay attention because they’re too busy looking at naked ladies. Either way, stop screaming, would you?
I for one am betting this so-called “Internet” is really going to catch on. It’s neato. Take, for example, these things knowns as “blogs” – you’re soaking in one right now! These blogs are great because they allow people with special insight to instantly convey their astute observations and sage opinions to a knowledge-starved world. Or so I’m told. Personally, I’m mostly going to use this one to talk about the lost thespian promise of Erik Estrada. Because really, someone ought to. The man had screen charisma the way Marlon Brando had neck fat.
I sent a note to Mr. Feschuck suggesting he keep on writing in exactly this style if he wants to help Stephen Harper win.
Yesterday we took a look at party web sites before the formal start of the election campaign; today we’ll look at one site which has been revised as of the official launch of the campaign this morning.
Liberal Party of Canada – Campaign Site
Liberal 800×600 graphics mode
Pros:
- viewable with screens set to 800×600
- no use of Flash (an improvement over their standard site)
- attractive design which is generally simpler but still grabs attention
Cons:
- uses fixed font sizes which do not scale using the browsers scaling mechanism in Internet Explorer
- Doesn’t validate against HTML 4.0 Transitional; uses many attributes which do not exist for that doctype
Liberal – text mode
Here we see the Liberal site designers making the same mistakes. There is no “skip to content” link to allow text-mode browsers to quickly get to the meat of the matter; images galore without alt attributes (and titles, where needed) take up much of the screen while imparting no information – this is an easy thing to fix without changing the design for GUI users one whit. Cost? Less than 2 minutes of time editing the template.
The postal code lookup form is unusable in text mode, unless one is willing (and astute enough) to discover why it doesn’t work and erase the text in the field.
Conclusion
Overall the Liberal campaign site is a slight improvement in general effectiveness over the standard Liberal party site in that the pop up menus have been removed; the design punched up; and content continues to dominate on most pages; navigation is consistent page to page. Users of graphical browsers will generally be well served by this site.
A few simple changes, at minimal cost, would make this site work much better for all. The Liberal site remains one of the leaders in terms of delivering the message to the broadest group of people.
Update on Other Sites
No changes to the NDP, Conservative or Bloc sites have been observed.
What’s with this – yesterday the CPC Conservative web site was dreadfully slow, today its comatose. A full minute passed before the page even started to render on my browser. All the bumpf that Conservative site designers have jammed into the site have grown the initial page size (first visit a user makes to the site) to over 358kb !!. What’s worse, their web server doesn’t employ gzip compression which would certainly help reduce text, javascript, and css file transmission times.
Liberal home page size: 93k; NDP: for some time this morning the NDP site was down/connection refused. Back up now, it clocks in at 86K; Bloc: a whopping 1 megabyte!
I looked briefly at the Green Party http://www.greenparty.ca/ website, thinking perhaps they might be a little more with it when it comes to accessibility and standards, but was disappointed. Its a decently executed site – somewhat busy – in graphics mode, which suffers in text mode from many of the same ills as the other party sites.
Updated Ranking of All Sites
With the Liberal campaign site changes in mind, page loading times, site availability and, as always, my subjective appraisal, here’s the new ranking from best to worst:
Message to election site designers: focus on content and make sure content is accessible to everyone.