Political website I designed and am maintaining

[JonathanMiller]

http://www.tomleppert.com

I designed this site and have been maintaining it for several months now. The campaign is coming to an end as the elections for Dallas Mayor is Saturday!

The site made it into the Dallas Morning news, they did a story comparing the two candidates websites, and my design totally beat the opponents!


Critiques welcomed...


PS: there is an "inside scoop" section... yeah I DIDN'T design that, so don't blame me for its horrificness...

[doctor_funk]

In history, designers good and bad have had major influences on politics. From the communist posters of Russia and China to the Bauhau movement in Germany, designers around the world have used their abilities to influence the way people view and perceive politics, life and social affairs. To a certain degree, it's our responsibility to make that effort again. The power of design has weakened and more and more we obediently suck off the teet of corporate cash. Having an opportunity to really tell an audience something that may affect their lives is a rare and priceless chance these days.

That said, as clean as your site is and as clean a guy as Mr. Leppert may be, your site really isn't telling us anything. You could swap out his face and name for canned beans and the video for another of some kids enjoying the beans. What says politics here? For that matter, this is for an American mayor, where's the patriotism? We're famous for it, there needs to be some stars and stripes in there to make us feel proud. Symbolism and social standards. What message does Mr. Leppert want to share with the Dallas? Something from that message should be strongly represented with the design, even if it has to remain corporate. CSS is a very powerful tool. Use it to break those stacked tables and sprawl a flag across the page or some proud looking statue that comes in from the side.

[BlueEyedMonster]

Looks good. The orange text in the header looks pixelated to me ("work hard" and "Dallas").

Nice use of another color. Every freaking political website is red / white / blue. So I like the orange and light blue.

Only other picky thing is the bg gradient. The transition to the darker blue isn't very seemless.

:cool:

[JonathanMiller]

@doctor_funk: The color choice was not mine to make. The logo and colors were already in place when I joined the team and developed the website. And personally I think its a good choice. Every other candidate (and there were 11 to start) used the red white and blue colors. Patriotism is great, but this is a mayoral race, not the Presidency, so draping the site with the American flag is, in my opinion, not necessary.

Also I use CSS religiously. You will not find any tables in my code.

@BlueEyedMonster: really? the gradient doesn't transition well? I've seen it on dozens of machines (PC and Mac) and haven't noticed any breaks. Well, gradients are never perfect, but it was necessary for some contrast.

Thanks for your insights!

[simplistik]

Well... my company does lots of political campaign websites, and we have always used a form of red/white/blue. While the palette is limited it's relatively easy to get different looks from it if you have the vision to do so.

Being patriotic is an important part of any type of governmental campaign. I think you should've added red in there and used the yellow as a third pop color... not the primary, that's just IMO.

The coding is pretty clean, I did find some issues with it, such as using <br/> all over the place when you should be using <p></p> or using <p></p> all over the place when you should be using a list.

Other things that you need to take into consideration, is that, it is law for governmental websites to be 508 compliant. This site failed in the simple 508 compliancy, and when dropped into lowband it's easy to see that the navigation is non-existent. It's also important for you to fill out that metadata for sites like this as well. And for someone who's not visually impared it's still relatively difficult to find the separation between articles, posts, and what not... cause everything looks exactly the same. Same grey headers, w/ the same grey body copy, there's nothing to divide it up and make it interesting and noticable.

I also notice that this isn't a dynamic site... must be a bi*** to update :(. Actually looking at the code looks like you're using software CMS like Contribute or something.

You do have some nice features on the site... like the side bar w/ the accordian on it. Though I'm quite surprised that you can legally do that without adding disclaimers, and other required things for the donations.

Lastly... Gill Sans for the nav? Bleh, definately need to stop that :lol: that's one of those designer no no's. It was put on the font ban list, along with Comic Sans and Impact.

[Voetsjoeba]

I didn't like the site very much. It lacks elegance. It's too blocky and screamy with those bigass header texts just jumping right onto your face. Kinda plain too .. I mean, the header is just blue. The accordeon effect on the right was extremely choppy for me, I think it ran at exactly 1fps. And, you have a spelling error in the "Get a yard sign" bit.

[rondog]

I agree with most of the above. The color palletes should be more "political." I also think that the font size should be brought down 2 or 3 pixels. I find verdana 11 is the best with line space of 1.4em looks pretty good and its easy to read.

[Anogar]

I was going to post something insightful but then I realized it wouldn't even be a little bit useful after Simp's awesome critique. The man knows what he's talkin about. :stare:

[BlueEyedMonster]

@BlueEyedMonster: really? the gradient doesn't transition well? I've seen it on dozens of machines (PC and Mac) and haven't noticed any breaks. Well, gradients are never perfect, but it was necessary for some contrast.

I don't mean there are breaks in it, what I mean is that the transition from one color to another is too drastic for that small distance. It's a personal taste thing, not a right / wrong thing.

Compare the left and right in this pic (http://i19.tinypic.com/4vre5as.jpg)

Left is my gradient, right is yours.

[JonathanMiller]

Holy cow! what browser are you using? and what has it done to my site?!


I don't mean there are breaks in it, what I mean is that the transition from one color to another is too drastic for that small distance. It's a personal taste thing, not a right / wrong thing.

Compare the left and right in this pic (http://i19.tinypic.com/4vre5as.jpg)

Left is my gradient, right is yours.

[doctor_funk]

Simplistik is right, you need to make this accessible to everyone including those who are hard of hearing(subtitles on the video maybe or a transcript of the video) and those who are vision impared(metatags, proper line breaks and formatting). If you're confused by what browser B.E.M. used, try browsershots.org when testing your site. You can see samples in nearly every browser(you just need patience because it takes a long time to process sometimes).

[BlueEyedMonster]

Holy cow! what browser are you using? and what has it done to my site?!

I'm using firefox 2.0.0.4

If you're freaking out because of the 'download' link in my screen shot that bumps your content down, don't be. That is an extension I have installed. That's not normal for firefox.