mike watkins dot ca : Election 2006 - Party Web Sites II

Election 2006 - Party Web Sites II

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.