Thu, 03/07/2008 - 11:11
We've just launched the campaign website for Caroline Lucas MEP. She is standing here in Brighton to (hopefully) become the UK's first Green MP. The site is built using Drupal, which is rapidly becoming the CMS of choice for non-profits and activists everywhere.
Making a political campaign website is a very different challenge to the activist NGO work that we usually do. Here are a few other political campaign websites that are doing something special, so I thought I'd share them here with my thoughts.
Both Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton's websites feature splash pages asking you for your email address. This breaks one of the rules of web design, in that it is a barrier preventing users getting to the content. The campaign teams have clearly decided that capturing people's email addresses is more important than the problems raised by a splash page.
While I'll struggle to find common policy with Boris Johnson, his campaign was successful and it is good to see all the social media links on his site. The Twitter stream is particularly good, in that it builds a more personal connection with people who might vote for him. There are also links off to his facebook group and some YouTube videos. It would be great to see campaign sites working out ways to integrate this social media content into their site, rather than sending people elsewhere.
Segolene Royal was the Socialist candidate for the French Presidential elections in 2007. I was quite disappointed when she lost the race, as she was pioneering a new type of democracy. Citizens were invited to give their opinions on different issues via her campaign website. She then had a team of researchers integrating these into policy documents. Royal would then use these documents to inform her official policy. It is far from direct democracy, but it is a step in the right direction.
If you know of any other political campaign websites that are doing something special, then comment on this post or send me an email. We might use their ideas in the Caroline Lucas site, and you'll have helped to make history!