Judging A Candidate By Their Website

Jack Lynch

Today, the news travels faster on the internet than any other news media. That explains why all the news print and television station owners all have an online presence today. In politics, a good website can be instrumental in a candidate's success. Online campaigning can aid in recruiting volunteers, raising money, and most important, getting the message of the candidate out to the voters.

I thought that a judgment of the sixth district democratic candidates based on 21st century web media was worthwhile, if somewhat sad for some of the potential losers in the design and presentation fray

Internet appearance is going to be the mother's milk of campaigning for office (wake up!),....until, well.... forever.

Search engine ranking, blog links, etc. will be the foundation for success. Building in keywords and active content, daily blog updating, user comments, and having graphic ads that can be shared with other sites - those will be winners. Rule the web and increase your winning potential, beyond that, it will again be the candidate and views on issues, but failing that, nobody will bother to care.

Whatever the fallout, when you put yourself out as a candidate, you'd better be certain of your presentation prior to release, and you should be ready for public consumption upon announcing, so let's go!

Andrew Duck - an A+ for appearance, effort, content, and style. He comes across as a seasoned pro, probably due to his long efforts, professional help along the way, and because he's just plain been a serious candidate for awhile and likely our best chance of ousting Roscoe Bartlett from the office he once declared he'd only keep one term, yeah right! His photos page is nice, but the blog was dead when I checked. Nice drop down links from top menu - good work!

Jennifer Dougherty - an out and out disappointment, with work it might garner a C. For one smart lady with a real public interest, it's just a shame at present, but perhaps it's a quick effort to be revised soon, let's hope so, before any savvy voters find it. Text heavy, her pic stretched on her 'message' page, yikes! Her yellow background is nice, just needs integration into a real graphic look and feel.

Robin Deibert - a C, she is beginning to 'get it', seems harsh and second generation web design with the heavy black link buttons, her page title is 'Home', no search-ability there - she needs more background on herself as an introduction to those far flung corners of the 6th District.

Larry Smith - also an A, except for the text size and style, there is intelligence in the design and decent graphic quality. Not quite up to the Duck site standards, but a worthwhile effort and fairly effective online communication

Rick Lank - a C for web efforts, he is an interesting guy with a lot of progressive involvement - but his website reads like a long over stuffed blog - dude, get a site map and some standard page content design - an example of too much dependence on a style sheet for presentation imo - an image was missing at page top - the graphics feel clumsy and heavy handed. The differing colors of text must go!

So there's the first blush - on web communications, Duck wins hands out and gains credibility with internet savvy voters.