Thought I’d do a quick objective review of the big three national political party websites from a technology perspective. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, although one is an obvious leader.
The NDP party website is run with open-source software. They have an RSS feed (although it’s not <link/>ed for autodetection and easy subscription). The site is functional—it’s nice to see a Search form—and accessible (as judged by Lynx).
Next on the list are the Liberals. Their site is run with what appears to be custom-developed software (written in .NET, which means they’re running on a Windows server). There’s no RSS in sight, and not even a prominent form to sign up for party news via e-mail. Lynx shows pages full of [left_main_pic.gif], [spacer.gif], and the like, but at least it’s logically laid out so you can navigate through the whole site.
Then there are the Conservatives. The website is built on commercial PHP-based software. Unfortunately it features a lot of Flash-for-Flash’s sake, which (in Firefox at least) means their Javascript dropdown menus are completely hidden behind the slideshows of static images. (There’s also a fairly major problem with the fading text in the “banner”, which is cutting off lowercase characters’ descenders… familv, communitv, unitv.) They do have a unique feature in targeted RSS feeds: you can choose from stories, press releases, speeches, and so on. Accessibility is a beast though. Navigation links are all jammed together (VolunteerDonateJoineNews SignupSend an eCardRequest a lawn signContact Us) and there are a few [cpc-ReadMore.jpg] image placeholders visible; worst of all, though, is that content is intermingled with sidebars, headers, footers, etc., with a lot of each page’s unique material relegated to the very bottom of the page.
So I think the conclusion is obvious: If it were all about the technology, the NDP would have my vote. Of course, they haven’t chosen a candidate in my riding yet…. And now they have: Stephen Maynard.
Unsurprisingly, but unfortunately, none of the sites detects the language the browser prefers. Both the Conservative and NDP websites default to English but provide a link to the French version; the Liberal site makes the user choose on its splash screen, which I guess is marginally better.
Mike Watkins got here before me, and has a lot of the same criticisms (and uses similar techniques) as I did. His review of the campaign sites goes into some things I didn’t think to look at, like whether the fonts used are scalable. And his look at site security is disturbing.
Good stuff all round.