Flanders…I laughed out loud (I know, I know - I’m a nerd)

Having worked as the only paid staffer on a campaign for a state senate candidate, I found Ireland/Nash’s chapter on recruiting volunteers (pgs. 181-195) extremely insightful… I wish I had read the same passages a year ago. Throughout the whole chapter I kept thinking, “well yeah, that makes sense… and that’s a great idea… and why didn’t I think of that?!”

For instance, the authors explain the importance of staying on message in regards to the campaign website’s rhetoric, and targeting likely voters. I think so often the campaign websites become a dumping ground resulting in a hodgepodge of unrelated and therefore unusable information (from the voter’s perspective).

Likewise, Jackob Neilsen brings up some interesting pitfalls of web design in his article Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. Of them, I was most surprised by two. First, I guess just because I’ve used Google so much lately I’ve forgotten that not every search engine checks spelling on the inquiry (his number one on the top ten mistakes). Does anyone know if implementing the search inquiry spell check is just another option when creating a search box for a website or is it a whole separate addition (software wise)? And the second thing that surprised me on Neilsen’s top ten list, was his caution about having anything that looks like an advertisement on your campaign website (number six). I originally assumed that flashing graphics would draw attention, but he pointed out that it just annoys your viewers. I fully agree with his assessment of pop-up ads, there really isn’t anything worse than when you’re trying to navigate around a site online and you consistently get interrupted!

Vincent Flanders wrote a great article all about the worst of the worst. It’s like a car wreak you don’t want to look, but you have to – right? In Flanders’ article The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004 he rips apart a bunch of unrelated (in that they don’t all belong to one genre) websites and ends up with a list of fourteen “commandments” that can easily be incorporated to any political online campaigning effort. I believe this article was very helpful and gave a clear to-do and not-to-do explanation for campaign web designers without resorting to all the technical jargon.