Web Site Review #3a

Benjamin Melançon

Presidential Campaigns: Al Gore

Topic

Purpose

Source

Target Audience

Gore’s campaign site is directed at both supporters and potential voters.  The sort of inherent contrast between the two is mitigated a tiny bit by an explicit assumption on the part of the site designers that people interested in getting Gore elected are also interested in the issues that Gore is campaigning on.  This of course may be comepletely untrue in many cases, but by placing “join this group” next to the list of Gore’s “accomplishments” (such as on the Educators page).  They actually squandered the opportunity to truly integrate the ‘why should you vote for Gore’ and ‘how to support Gore’ sections of the site.  None of the “Issues” (such as Education) have links to the “Voter Outreach” groups related to them or links to other ways to get involved.

Content

The main page features many links to news of import about the Gore campaign, inevitably about some issue of import that Gore has decided to champion and how it will benefit you.

The site has a lot of content.  Substantially more, when compared directly, than the Bush site.  Even the biography section has significant content: a time-line setup about Gore’s life which includes some details on legislation he has supported or proposed, a “Road to the Whitehouse” section, and an “Al Gore story” video as well as a more standard biographical sketch.

The Gore site appears to cover each of their 33 issues in much more depth than the Bush site covers any of their 26.

Spanish: Spanish was an important part of both sites content.  If I were running a campaign and had national resources, I think I would try to put up at least the third most widely spoken language in the nation— if only to avoid the appearance of pandering to one politically important group and ignoring everyone else, or if only to fool myself into believing that the U.S. does not have any danger of bifurcating along the lines of language.

Site Plan & Navigation

The content starts right near the top of opening page with the first paragraph of the “main story.”  The “read more” link is straightforward, and the “Download [variation of main story name]” link is almost clearly an opportunity to download the same article in .PDF format.

No links are really repeated.  Most links had a small and sometimes explanatory blurb beneath them.  All navigation remained with you no matter where you went in the site.

The user gets to issues through a drop-down form.  Once at an issue page it gives a brief introduction and splits into “Accomplishments” and “Agenda.”  The links are right next to each other – the user has to consciously choose one or the other first – so it is pretty silly to provide the option to “Read Al Gore’s agenda on this issue” at the very top of the “Accomplishments” page, and vice versa, as the site does.  The longer documents have another page that you can get to if you “Click to read more details.”  This is somewhat ambiguous. As it turns out, the content that follows is simply a continuation of the content that preceded it (after an annoying repetition of the introductory paragraph) and not a more detailed version of the same material.

Altogether navigation is good and the site plan is also reasonable, although information does seem to be spread out more than it has to, such as among voter outreach groups as well as accomplishments and agenda or the number of sections under the “Get to Know Us” section, but this is all defensible as a way of not making the content too much to absorb at once.

Links

On the privacy page they tell it to you straight: “Our site links to a limited number of other web sites.”  There are only a few links that take you outside the large site(s?) paid for by Gore/Lieberman, Inc.  One comes after you fill out a preliminary voter registration form; you get sent along with your data to beavoter.org, which, brilliantly, has shut down to ensure that all registration forms are mailed on time.  So that link was useless.

There were three links to three different sites where people can buy campaign merchandise from officially liscensed and approved vendors.  Most links were concentrated at the “Internet Tools for Families” page.

Page Design

The navigation simply takes up too much of the page.  A lot of it is useful, but ultimately it could be made smaller.  That it wasn’t probably reflects the tention between screen sizes.  So if the page fills your screen, the navigation buttons are really large, and if the graphics are smaller because they are displayed on a monitor of higher resolution then the page doesn’t fill the screen.  Even with this problem, the navigational aids could have been condensed without making the “text graphics” any smaller.  Of course, there is also the issue of using images to display text in the first place, a bad idea in Nielsen’s book (literally— page 46).

The Gore site has a reasonably sized red bar at the top of the site with “Issues” written in reasonably large white letters, which I somehow managed to find after I found a tiny text "Issues" link at the bottom of the page.

Other than my problem there, I had never had any difficulty finding the link I needed to click to do a particular thing, even though the navigation is sort of spread out onto a terrifying three sides of the page— four, counting the text repeats of the main links at the bottom of the page.  I think I am forced to conclude that a lot of thought went into the layout, and that it simply works.

Perhaps an important part of this, and it is significant in its own right, is that the page layout remained consistent throughout the site.

Creativity

Functionality

Download speed: www.algore.com took six seconds to display its content (test conducted with Opera browser and ethernet connection).  It ‘weighed’ about 135 kilobytes.

Screen sizes: The page is wedged in a table that fills the full width of 800 by 600 screens, but cannot expand to fill larger screens.  Admittedly, it still looks fine on 1024 by 768, but on small screens it requires horizontal as well as vertical scrolling.

Gore's drop-down list of voter outreach groups is slightly dysfunctional. Only one line is highlighted at a time even though many of the group names takes up two lines. This can cause confusion. For example, is it "Faith Community" or "Community Firefighters"?

Unique Features

Banner ads.  Not usually associated with sites financed by flush political campaigns, the Gore site has banner ads.  They were not placed at the top of the page and they were not aggressively aggravating.  I now know something I didn’t know before: it is much more the placement and visual assault of banner ads that make users dislike them rather than their mere existence.  Ethically, it is a questionable move.  Is the idea to disassociate Gore from direct attacks on Bush?  Are they trying to make us believe that these sites, such as “Real Plans for Real People” dot com or “Bush insecurity,” are not coming from the same source as the Gore site the ads appear on?  They should be straightforward about this, and the banner ad thing strikes me as sneaky.

The Gore campaign site has a special format for hand-held computers that they invite you to use.

Surprises: One big surprise was what has changed.  I had visited both sites long before, during the primaries, at which time the Bush site used to have a big, prominent “En Español” link near the top of the site and now the Gore site has a big, prominent link while the Bush site now has a form to change the language (also only to English or Spanish) which is down the page a distance.

The absolute uniquest feature is that the Gore campaign is seeking help in designing their page, probably particularly in the technical aspects.  Inside the source code on Wednesday, September 27, for example, was the following:

Thanks for checking out our source code!  I plan to use this space to post special messages to those who are helping to improve our web site -- by making our site the best it can be.  The fact that you are peeking behind the scenes at our site means you can make an important difference to this Internet effort.  I'm grateful for your help and support in this campaign.  Now let's keep working to build the 21st Century of our dreams!

Al Gore

In an earlier message they claimed to have incorporated over 200 suggestions from people who had looked at the source code.  On this one, single, little feature alone Al Gore should win the presidency, based on his campaign’s web site.

©2000 September 24 · beMWeb