Why Labor Has Won The Online Election Over Liberals
There is a general consensus that the Australian 2010 Federal Election is going to be decided by swinging voters. Given this, would it not be prudent to ensure that your online presence is up to scratch? Surely, even the most outdated politician can gather that traditional scare campaigns such as “The Facts” TV and viral campaign by the Labor party and similar discreditation campaigns by the Liberals only serve to confuse and anger the general voting public. Obviously, most people wanting to find out what the parties stand for go to the net! So why are both Liberal and Labor party websites so poor?!
Let’s start with the better of the two: The Labor Party
The Pros:
- Loads very quickly: you do not want to keep potential voters waiting to load content. The ALP website loads in 2.96 seconds according to official web loading speed testers. Though I have found that it is much faster than that. The fact that the Labor party has only 12 other websites on the dedicated server also contributes to this good loading time.
- Modern Look at feel: Labor certainly has a modern site by most standards. Adhering to a generic “WordPress Inspired” like Web2.0 theme. It uses good colour combinations, icons and sliders to create a familiar and “expected website” look and feel.
- Basic optimisation is there: good title and description tags, good use of social media etc etc. Small SEO elements missing, but over all, not a bad effort.
Cons:
- What I really hate about the labour website is that it is difficult to navigate to crucial pages that a potential voter may want to visit. Say a “policy” page. That would be nice! Julia Gillard has been widely criticised in the media for having “no economic plan”, so it would have been good to see “Economic Plan” somewhere in the main navigation under say a “Policy” heading and similarly a link somewhere from the homepage. Instead what you get (as shown in the image below), is an “Agenda” menu item with “more policies” submenu item with heaps of drop down pages. Not to mention the fact that the menu overlaps with the slider item. This site could definitely use a usability review!
Labor "Agenda" navigation with many submenu items!
2. The site is way too long and busy. The use becomes lost and looks to the top menu to try and gain some sort of navigational clarity. But to no avail! Whilst the “Connect With Labour” second half of the site may be an important tool in the election, it would not do much good to swinging voters who have not yet made up their minds!
3. Internal pages such as the Agenda Page abuse images. Searchability is important. Not just from the search engine perspective, but also from the users’ perspective. Bombarding visitors with an array of stupid images with smiling people and text laden images is definitely a poor decision. When I visited that page, all I wanted was a clear hierarchy of relevant pages, and what you see below is what you get! Smiling gits that do not fool anyone.
Image bombardment by labor
4. No image use?? Make up your mind labor website administrators, either you are going with the theme of cute icons and images or your are not! The Health Reform page was a horrendous usability fail! Which could have definitely used some nice sliders such as the one on the home page, icons, and videos to break up the monotonous text!
Overview: Very disappointed at the poor structure of the site. Navigationally, the Labor site really failed. Also, some of the design elements of the site were a bit dated, given that you can generate text on top of images with a neat CSS trick, that could have definitely helped the above Agenda page to say the least! But, page speed and relative modernity (to the Liberal site) means that I would grade this site 6.5/10.
Now let us turn our attention to the Liberals!
Pros
- Dedicated server to a dedicated site. But keep reading because this still did not help the page speed!
- Generally good SEO basics such as meta title and description etc. are pretty good!
Cons:
- The most annoying thing about this site, which made me very angry and actually forced me to leave the site was the terrible loading speed! According to most website speed tools, the site loads in over 3 seconds. However, on several machines that I have tested, the site takes 7-10 seconds to load!! Now the site is not that heave at just over 40kb, but something is slowing it down majorly. Maybe the server is old, and is unable to cope with web traffic or modern code! Maybe there are plugins and database issues that need to be sorted out. Yes, Tony Abbot is an economic conservative, but come on Tony, invest in a better server and website!! Not only is the page speed slow, the site keeps trying to load something continuously even after the page has loaded! On this point alone, the site fails.
- Design: What also really annoyed me about site is the stupid, and I must say, patronising background graphic of the heavens opening up. To me, this image exacerbated the anger that the slow loading time of the site has ignited. This allusion to religion, only diminished the modernity of the site and further helped to support Abbotts’ poor reputation as being out of touch with modern values! The colour scheme was pale, and the home page banner image should have been a slider or an interactive widget of some sort, but definitely NOT an image of Abbott with his mouth in a semi open state! Smile!
3. I became really excited to see “Policies” in the main navigation menu. This quickly faded when I had to wait 10 seconds for the page to load, and faded even quicker when I realised that all of the internal links were in PDF format!!! Was it that difficult to hire an admin person to simply transfer all of the PDF data from the cumbersome PDF files into simple text and add some images??! Another fail! Also, Tony, considering that the elderly are likely to vote for you, try and make your website easier for them to navigate and don’t confuse them with downloads of PDFs!
Overall: The Abbott website is most definitely a fail due to the extremely poor usability due to slow loading speed and prolific use of PDFs. Overall score: 3/10.
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