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For a minute, I wondered if there was a way if I could turn those blasted captions off. I guess you could say the bread was in the slots, but the Toaster wasn't plugged in.

We've all learned from Jakob that web designers should think about usability before they think about nifty tricks and glitzy design. It takes watching these three interviews with students for whom navigating a website can be more than a challenge to really drive his point home.

Technology is intended to make lives easier. Tools like the Internet have the potential to bring ease to the lives of people with disabilities. While your website certainly doesn't need to embody the austerity that Jakob's usability bible has chosen, it needs to be designed in a way that shows you do things "on purpose."

There's a middle ground between Mr. Nielsen's world of white space and large-sized Verdana and that new supercool indie band's Flash-heavy homepage with the cartoon intro that leads to a bunch of un-navigable pages of graphic links. Some things I've learned:

1) Slick videos are great: Give them captions.
B) Innnovative design with neato links looks cool. Make sure your screen can be read by a screen-reader program.
4) Oh, and don't ever design a page that can't be navigated with a keyboard. (I know enough about mice problems to sympathize deeply with this one.)
ix) Don't use text that is indecipherable from the background of your page.
AND) Don't use fixed-size tiny fonts. (On another personal note: my father is hard of seeing, and he will beat you up if you do it.)

Look! Jakob's Looking Out for Everyone

Well, you can't keep a man like Jakob Nielsen down, and he advocates you shouldn't keep Web users of lower literacy down either.

If you didn't have enough reason already to cut out the superfluous graphics, text blocks and design frills, Jakob gives you a really easy one: an estimated 30 percent of Web users can't handle it.

Campaign websites, just like those of our favorite pharmaceutical corporation, Pfizer, benefit from making text short, priortizing information and getting right to the point on their sites. What's fascinating, but not surprising, about the study Nielsen sites is that easier, more usable sites lead to happier, more successful users. And that means happier, more successful clients.

But, when everyone's happy and successful, nobody's happier or more successful than Jakob.

Pt. 2: The Bad, The Ugly

When it comes down to it, the Connaughton4LtGov site simply didn’t perform in the way it needed to in order to compete statewide.

Starting with main layout, the page is cluttered and clunky, which makes me, someone who is unnaturally obsessed with political campaign websites, want to navigate away fast. The in-site navigation links follow no logical arrangement whatsoever, instead leaving me with repetitive options such as "Biography," "Education" and "Military Service," all of which could have been compiled into one section. "Press Coverage," "Press Releases," "Newsletters" and "TV Ads" could have benefited from a similar organizational heading. Other links that read "Click for More" yield pages with nothing more to see, an obvious result of careless web design or lazy upkeep. Embarrassingly, the list of navigation links, which should remain consistent throughout the site, changes depending on which portion of the site you happened to be.

But the worst offense the Connaughton site commits is its lack of an e-mail sign-up and less-than-eye-catching "Voluntneer" and "Donate" buttons. Though I praised modesty above, there is absolutely no reason to be shy about letting your supporters support you. If that’s a problem for Connaughton, perhaps statewide politics aren’t his field. The site needed to adapt to the needs of prospective supporters and clearly lay out what that race was about. While we all know Sean Connaughton may be a nice, local guy, we unfortunately have no idea why he thinks he deserves to be Virginia’s lieutenant governor.

Connaughton4LtGov: An In-Depth Look Pt. 1

Now that Sean Connaughton'’s campaign for Virginia's lieutenant governor has come to an early end in a loss to State Senator Bill Bolling in the June 7 primary, hindsight becomes a campaign manager'’s best enemy. This analysis of his web campaign will attempt to point out one area in which Connaughton showed promise and another in which his weaknesses were fully exposed.
[Note: The Connaughton website was taken down the night of the primary, but the infrastructure of the site remains online. Please go to www.connaughton4ltgov.com/bio.shtml to navigate. Unfortunately, the home page is forever changed.]


>>The Good
What Connaughton needed to do was break away from Bolling'’s issues and define the race on his terms, perhaps on veterans affairs or job creation. The site's strengths were few and far between, heavily outweighed by its clunky, cluttered, disorganized, amateur negatives. The result is that I couldn'’t help but think that the campaign was doomed. If the website isn't competing properly, how can I expect any other aspect of the campaign to be doing so?


But there is silver lining in the Connaughton site. In wanting to portray himself as a down-to-earth, small-time local guy who gets the job done, the candidate established an excellent tone on his website. While it is hard to quantify the concept of tone, I feel that the tone of a campaign site can make it or break it for a lot of voters. If it strays too deeply into the negative or desperate, an undecided visitor can see that and will be turned off. If it sounds too good to be true, a voter’'s cynicism will be topping out the meters.


Connaughton opted out of the slick layout and graphics that his opponent used well, instead using a very rudimentary design that looks, feels and operates as if it'’s homemade. Without a doubt, this modesty is necessary for Connaughton'’s image. In essence, the site is politely saying, "Hey, our guy isn'’t a Richmond big-talker. He'’s a Prince William big-doer." Had the content of the site and the layout evoked a consistency with this tone, the sky could have been the limit for Connaughton, promoting and defending his record while serving primarily as a community tool by which Virginia Republicans can come and spread the word about Connaughton, make a public endorsement, and be persuaded to volunteer and donate.

Freedom Isn't Free

Finally free from the Brits!

This may or may not have been a piñata my freedom-fighting friends and I constructed last year to symbolize our independence. [Note: Blue is wearing a T-shirt with the Union Jack on it...we did not desecrate an actual flag. We may, however, have desecrated the history and mystique surrounding the American Revolution by reducing it to Tootsie Rolls inside a papier-mâché Nick, Jr. character.]