It’s election season in Canada and that means another fresh batch of web site redesigns.
2008 is a special year for political web design: the bar has been blown through the roof by BarackObama.com. How do Canadian sites do in comparison? Let’s just hope that we can get through this election without the rest of the world noticing how bad our parties’ sites are.
(For the sake of brevity, critiques of the Green Party and the Bloc Quebecois are left as exercises for the reader)
First, the good: NDP.ca
A solid design with lots of nods to Obama’s site. Compare:
- a shot of Layton gazing into a brighter future (or is it the past? He’s looking to the left)
- bold colours with glows and gradients all over the place: in the header, behind the icons, etc.
- even the donation splash page is straight from the Obama playbook
There are lots of other little things that they got right. For instance, there’s a prominent place for the email signup. In spite of the wishes of us technophiles, most people still consume info via email.
It’s not flawless though: it’s a bit strange that the first three menu options don’t have any sub-options. Also, the sections of the plan page could be organized as drop down options. Also, why do they have to be listed using images instead of text.
Update: Could the site get any more Obama-like? This popped up on the site today:
Overall, the site does what it has to do and it actually looks like it belongs in 2008. Unlike:
The bad: Liberal.ca
A pretty uninspired design.To be honest, I can’t even think about what to say about it since it’s so boring (does this say anything about Dion?).
The site is riddled with small problems that build up to give a bad impression.
A few picked at random:
- Green videos? Is this a mistake?
- The colour of the body type is a light gray and doesn’t give enough contrast against the white background. This surely won’t help with the geriatric vote.
- Why is Flash being used all over? For instance, on the front page, all they’re using it for is to do mouseover effects — totally unnecessary.
- The link to Dion’s profile is broken if you go via this page.
A bland site with little overall design; however, it’s not as bad as:
The downright ugly: Conservative.ca
It’s almost a national disgrace that the governing party of Canada has a site that’s this ugly and childish. I’ll avoid discussing the controversial jabs that they make at Dion and note some of the design problems:
- The header is brutal: there’s a logo that’s too fuzzy, a ridiculous little bump in the background image to accommodate Harper’s head, and a photo that looks like a snapshot from a point and shoot camera.
- Bevels!? These were barely even cool back in the era when people were first discovering Photoshop.
- Interior pages that look like they were ripped bleeding out of a Word document.
- Really bad icons everywhere. Note the folder icons used on this page.
Perhaps it’s all just a guise. Good design? That’s for elites.
Maybe another election…
Very disappointing performances from Canada’s two big parties. It’s hard to believe that these national organizations could do so poorly on such a crucial part of any campaign.
at 7:47 am
Brian:
Interesting post.
I agree, that the NDP site does feel like Obama ’08 on a budget. I am not as bothered by lack of drop-downs (which I don’t particularly like generally) but that many of the drop-downs only have one item. Why bother?
The Liberal and
PCConservative sites are so similar in layout it is rather scary. Top nav, centre block full of images as buttons, and secondary nav along the right side. It is like johnmccain.com with less AJAX.One less thing. The Flash on liberal.ca does much more than rollover effects – it has the images swoop in when you load the page! *rolls eyes*
-Brian
at 11:55 am
Sophia:
Ha! I was just thinking the same thing; that some strategists may view fancy websites as elitist so keep them simple to appeal to everyone… although Harper’s takes it to a new level. Also, the photo in the Header looks more like a protest and that red poster (Canada. Harper.)… what does that even mean? Terrible, just terrible.
at 12:17 am
nocluehalo:
I think the Liberal site is worse than the Conservatives because of this point: the stupid main images on the main page always jump up into the middle of the screen when you put your mouse over them!!
However, I think all 3 are quite horrid. I wouldn’t put on a resume that I designed any of those websites.
at 11:31 am
Fuller:
I think the analysis was interesting; I’m interested to know (and I’m not trying to be snide) how much a website design affects your decision about who to vote for?
Personally it means something, but very little. Unless of course the site blocks my ability to access platform information and I remain ignorant and misinformed.
at 1:25 pm
Sophia:
Well Mike, if you are aligned to a political party already, like most Canadians, then the website will have little to no impact on your vote, in fact I’d even venture to say most people who are already in the Conservative or Liberal camp probably aren’t even visiting the websites… which is perhaps why they put so little thought into them? But for first time or undecided voters, it’s all about marketing. Speaking of which, I just saw the TV ads for the NDP, and they almost convinced me to vote for them! I think that says a lot about who the NDP are trying to target with all their flash marketing.
at 6:01 pm
Isaac:
Great Post. All the parties have links to Facebook pages on their sites, but do you think any of them are making good use of it?
at 6:42 pm
Andrew Louis:
@Fuller, I really appreciate that question. I think we’d both agree that this kind of analysis is way easier to do than a deep discussion about policy — easier both for readers to consume and for me to write. In many ways, you could put this post in the same category as all the TV reports about Hillary’s pantsuits.
On the other hand, I think at the end of the day, voters are looking for someone who’s like them in terms of culture and values. That’s why the accusations of John Kerry being too French were legitimate worries for voters, in spite of how bizarre the discussion was.
Lists of specific policies are pretty one dimensional since they do not show if a candidate has the management and political skills to get things done, how they respond to snags, and what soft values they’ll be protecting. People pick up signals and cues from things like their web site look.
In this case, I don’t want to make any wild conclusions but take liberal.ca for instance: it’s a mess and has no overarching design. To me, that signals a party that doesn’t have it all together and is politically weak.
@Sophia Sure, it’s mostly about the undecided voters but if I’m a hardcore Liberal and I see that they look like a mess this year, I’m not really going spreading enthusiasm about them. This can hurt a party as much.
@Isaac, I was going to save that stuff for another day. In summary, they’re doing a pretty lousy job of it. Stephen Harper has 25 friends on Myspace for instance.
at 5:45 pm
Veronica:
Funny. But I am not surprised at the similaritly between Obama’s and Layton’s logo: they seem pretty generic, and “gazing up at the sky” is a simple and obvious way of signifying a vision, hope, change. I’m a bit sick of Harper’s family ads. I got a Rosh Hashana greeting in the mail with a photo of his family, for chrissake. Thanks, that’s exactly what I needed.
at 10:03 am
Peter Flaschner:
Andrew, this weekend I did something completely new to me: I wrote an angry email to the liberal party blasting them for their embarrassingly bad website.
I’m an undecided voter. Yesterday I figured I’d spend a bit of time familiarizing myself with the issues and the party’s positions. I was shocked to the point of anger to see just how terrible the sites were.
While I agree that the conservative’s site is bad, to me the liberal.ca site is inexcusable. It looks like it was put together by a bunch of PR people, not by anyone with any concept of how design works.
Visually, liberal.ca is insipid and totally uninspiring. The use of Flash, as you mentioned, is totally inappropriate – the mouse overs just repeat the same information as the link! The legibility of the sidebar titles is incredibly bad, etc etc etc.
For me though, the piece de resistance is the fact that the liberal platform, arguably the most important bit of information on the site, is only available as a pdf download. WTF is that?
If a first year design student handed liberal.ca in as a project, it would get a C.
I’m not willing to trust the future of my country to a group who can only muster C grade work.
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