UK political sites - are you thinking what we're thinking?
With the UK election campaign in full swing, we took a timely look at the websites for the three main political parties (with apologies to readers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for not covering all their parties, and no apologies at all to Veritas Party supporters for not covering their site).
— Published April 27th, 2005 | by David Moore | 1 Comments
Given the importance of the Internet during the recent US election, when both sides used blogging and aggressive online fund-raising to good effect, it's surprising that there's only patchy adoption of these approaches in the UK.
The Labour site goes the furthest, with an interesting blog written by Tony Blair himself, complete with revealing hand-held video footage from each day. The Lib Dems know they should be blogging, but leave it to Charles Kennedy's backroom staff, while the Tories can only provide a limp list of junior blogging politicos.
Elsewhere, the sites offer minor differences, but as the scores show, end up with quite similar results.
The Labour site is kept up to date, but the latest stories are buried three clicks into the site - even the first News page doesn't have any news on it. When combined with a petition splash-screen and a homepage long on design but short on information, it creates frustration for people looking for real content quickly.
Its regional account of government achievements (searchable by postcode) is well implemented, but the formatting of the pages is a little amateurish (when viewed on Firefox for Mac, anyway).
There are also some user-orientation issues - there's no breadcrumb trail or navigation that changes to reflect the current location.
This is something seen on the Conservative site, too, where the confusion is exacerbated by apparently duplicated navigation. The main options are down the left, but much more prominent are the tabs across the top, which link to policy issues.
Some video material is included, but it's only the party election broadcasts, and (as with the Labour site), more in-depth policy material is covered only by PDFs (that you don't know are PDFs until you launch one).
Lip service is paid to accessibility, and the site claims to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The page that says this does validate, but the first policy page, for example, has 311 errors. Some search results included broken links, which also grates.
But the Tories and the Lib Dems at least offer RSS feeds for their news (something the Labour site neglects). The Lib Dem site also has strong design and some useful information, but it also has less than perfect navigation and no information on accessibility.
Their homepage contains no news, but they are the only major party to emphasize their position on Iraq.
After a thorough review of all three sites, none of them stand out. They all make basic errors (poor user orientation, over-reliance on unflagged PDFs), and present a less than impressive picture over all. This is a particular surprise, given the high quality of many of the UK's public sector sites.
With the first-past-the-post electoral system, however, we have to plump for one of the tired-looking parties, so it has to be the Labour site for its steady if not spectacular performance.
The Conservative campaign slogan asks, 'Are you thinking what we're thinking?'. We're thinking the sites (and possibly the parties) need to show a little more quality and creativity to get us excited. Just as with the Irish political sites we reviewed last year, on the strength of their web presences, we'd rather abstain.
Scores
| Criteria | Lab | Con | LibDem |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content Value % | 71 | 71 | 69 |
| Functionality % | 60 | 67 | 67 |
| Site Design % | 60 | 50 | 57 |
| Weighted Total | 67 | 64 | 65 |
Related Links
- Labour's site - http://www.labour.org.uk
- Conservative site - http://www.conservatives.com
- The Liberal Democrats site - http://www.libdems.org.uk
Simon Nugent on May 3rd, 2005 wrote —
The main parties have, quite rationally, prioritised supporter recruitment on their websites. Fund raising, email address capturing and membership application processing engines all work very smoothly now on the UK party sites.
Parties see little value in making it easy for critics to scan the minutiae of policy. Why set yourself up to be bludgeoned by lazy media or your opponents? The strategy is "control the message. Keep it simple".
Research suggests that, as yet, almost no swing voters turn to party sites for the information they need to make dispassionate voting decisions. They may however seek out comforting messages that reassure them or, more likely, that could be forwarded to wavering friends. For this reason the video clips of the Tory and Labour attack ads are remarkably well presented and download extremely easily.
Electoral politics is a very specific sort of marketing, the implications for party web strategies flow from this. A review of the same sites 12 months from now will show quite different design and content approaches.