The Democrats are Doomed.
Sep. 21st, 2005 01:07 pmLast night I spent a brief while composing all of the things that a political website would need in order to be effective. Let's go through some of them. I've been asked to assemble this as an analysis for a local Democratic Pol in the hopes of making a cookie-cutter, drop-it-and-go website for Democratic politicians. Here's what I learned.
( A working list. )
Why do I say, then, that the Democrats are doomed? Because all of this advice came from publicly available Republican resources. The GOP has put together an extensive and effective network of toolkits, consultants, advisors, and tutorials on how to create a useful campaign or advocacy website. I was able to find nearly twenty in a few minutes.
Nothing like that exists for the Democrats. The frakking Greens have it more together than the Dems! Howard Dean's team put together "I support Howard Dean" templates, all of which have simply disappeared off the Internet. There has been no effort to take that material and turn it into something useful for the next wave of elections.
You know what really bothers me? This isn't hard! It can be done by almost anyone with a few days of practice with a common web development environment. If you want it active, you'll need a PHP or Rails hack-- and yeah, those are expensive. But someone should have put together a kit in some flavor of LAMP[?] two years ago with a tutorial on how to buy your own site ($250 per year; cheaper than printing the media kit!) and installing it.
( A working list. )
Why do I say, then, that the Democrats are doomed? Because all of this advice came from publicly available Republican resources. The GOP has put together an extensive and effective network of toolkits, consultants, advisors, and tutorials on how to create a useful campaign or advocacy website. I was able to find nearly twenty in a few minutes.
Nothing like that exists for the Democrats. The frakking Greens have it more together than the Dems! Howard Dean's team put together "I support Howard Dean" templates, all of which have simply disappeared off the Internet. There has been no effort to take that material and turn it into something useful for the next wave of elections.
You know what really bothers me? This isn't hard! It can be done by almost anyone with a few days of practice with a common web development environment. If you want it active, you'll need a PHP or Rails hack-- and yeah, those are expensive. But someone should have put together a kit in some flavor of LAMP[?] two years ago with a tutorial on how to buy your own site ($250 per year; cheaper than printing the media kit!) and installing it.
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