Democratic Party Websites: Part I | by Skye
I took a tour through several Democratic Party websites lately, looking specifically for information about precinct organizing. Along the way, I checked on a few other things that I thought would be crucial on a Party website:
- regular updates
- easy mailing list signup
- local information
- voting information
- list of other sites to visit (to help visitors bond more with the party)
- inspiration for getting involved
Here are my impressions of the State Party site. I'll put the county parties in a separate post.
The Texas Democratic Party website has some good stuff going on. The front page is regularly updated with press releases. The mailing list signup page is prominently linked from the front page and the form is clean and easy to understand. And it's only 2 clicks to find your county contact. Just about every page has a logo that says "Register to Vote."
The list of links is basically a laundry list, and several links are filed in the wrong place. No description of why you'd want to visit any of these folks - and it seems a little strange to me that we're writing out the URLs and making them the links. It takes up a lot of extra space and makes the page harder to scan. But this is a minor complaint.
Unfortunately, there is some very, very bad stuff as well. When I visited a couple of weeks ago, the "Get Involved" page was just a list of actions you could take, none of which were very well explained or very inspiring. When I go to a page like this, I want to be excited, and to do that, I have to understand what the possibilities are. Why would I want to schedule a grassroots training? Why would I want to contact my county party, and what should I say when I dot? And why can't I volunteer - do y'all not use volunteers?
The "Get Involved" page has now been de-hanced with ugly, ugly graphics. I don't know about you, but I don't read drop-shadowed fuschia on electric blue very well. The choices for involvement aren't described any better - check out the page you get when you click on "schedule a grassroots training."
And OH MY GOD people, the Grassroots Guide is an 83 page PDF with no graphics that still weighs in at 33 MEG!!! It takes about 5 seconds for each page to render in Acrobat. There's no way anyone with a dial-up connection is going to see this. Since I am trying to be helpful, I opened it in the full version of Acrobat and tried to reduce the file size - but there was some kind of error. So I'm stuck with a document I can't stand to read unless I print it, and I can't imagine how long that would take.
Finally, and these are bad ones: as far as I can tell, there is only one page in Spanish on the entire site. Carrie's going to have to tell me what it says, 'cause my French only gets me so far in reading Spanish. Then check out "Why Am I A Democrat?" Five men, one woman, only one visibly Hispanic surname.
Time to get to work, y'all.