Reviewing the competition

[elfs]

I don't feel so bad now. Tina's website went live this afternoon at http://www.electtinaorwall.com, and Omaha showed me the other two candidate's websites: Vote Todd Gibson and Tan Cares. They're both Wordpress sites.

Tan's is obviously done by someone with a primitive sense of design; the way his picture is situated above the poorly photographed flag in his banner shows a very poor sense of layout, and I bet the dropshadows came with the original theme on which his is based. The contrast is bad on the right-hand nav bar and it looks like whoever did this wasn't quite comfortable enough with Wordpress to mangle the theme to his liking, as it still looks much more like a blog than a campaign website. The background, with the striped layout, is visually disorienting. And there are no permalinks! That's an official What The.. ? right there.

Todd Gibson's is also a bit messy. The artist put a lot of time into his banner (and what's that funny red bar by the kid's elbow there?) and the rollovers are kinda cute, but does he have to put the "Paid for..." notice at the very top? That's something that goes in the footer, dude. Font selection is routine. I love the Put paypal link here notice... go live before you were ready, Todd? I love all the thank-yous the designers felt obligated to put into the bottom.

Here's the impression I'm getting: I am not an experienced Wordpress hack. I barely speak PHP, and often had a translation guide on my knee while I worked on Tina Orwall's website. But I know my HTML and CSS, and I know what I wanted, and I and my very passionate wife knew exactly how much work we were going to give Tina: enough until the page looked right. Ordinary, pedestrian, yes, but without a clank or a clatter, and that's what we acheived.

Comments

[danceswithlife]

Um. Your link to Tina's website in the post doesn't seem to be working.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

D'oh! Fixed, got it, thanks.

[halloranelder.livejournal.com]

Isn't it supposed to be http://www.electtinaorwall.com/ ?

:)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Fixed, thanks.

[deedop.livejournal.com]

Geez, the Tan Cares site is done with a barely tinkered with adaptation of the Connections (http://managedtasks.com/wpthemes/blog/) theme for WP, which is now three years old and has to be the single most overused theme in all of Wordpress. I can't imagine using that theme for a paying client, but if campaign volunteer did the work, I suppose that's a bit more forgivable.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Local politics here: elections dates aren't fixed, and "prospective candidates" are picked well in advance. And they distributed leaflets today.

They have a website, with a domain name based on the candidate's name. But the email address is totally different, and on Gmail.

Now, Gmail is good--I use it myself--but this leaves me feeling that they don't quite Get It. Put a mail forwarding layer in, and use the Gmail filters, and there's all sorts of useful options. Trivially, you can have one email address published for voters and people reading the website, and another, private, for the routine local-party admin.

Well, I expect you know all this stuff better than I. The impression I get is that a lot of people have an image of computers solidly rooted in single-user Windows.