Websites & manifesto access
Apr. 15th, 2010 02:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Having hit upon the idea to download the three main party manifestos instead of going to bed and finding that the high res Tory manifesto is taking its own sweet time to load it seems like as good a time as ever to compare the party websites and the availability of their manifestos.
The first site I looked at was the LibDem one which initially presented me with a simple choice between going to the specific manifesto section of the site or proceeding on to the general party site itself beneath a large picture of Nick Clegg presumably addressing a party conference. The main site featured a scrolling series of pictures at the top which while they moved a little quickly when they did change didn’t prove to be a huge distraction and could in fact be paused. While the pictures did generally feature Nick Clegg they show a variety of situations which were all applicable to his function as party leader. But what really impressed me was the clear, clean layout of the site. There were a variety of options on the left which focused on different policy areas, ways to sign up for local party involvement or e-mail updates on the right and a latest news update, a clickable list of parliamentary candidates and another link to the manifesto in the middle. Regardless of any LibDem future success the website designer is to be commended for making the sight straightforward to navigate.
There’s little else to say about the manifesto segment of the site for precisely the same reasons: the layout and range of information was clean, straightforward and wasn’t annoying to navigate.
Next I came to the Tory website replete with lots of blue and that awful scrawl of a tree that’s somehow become the Tory logo. The first thing that greeted me was what I initially took to be a rather unflattering picture of David Cameron that in fact turned out to be the first frame of a video. I didn’t bother watching it because if it’s anything like the videos I’ve seen before it’s just going to annoy me and even beyond that, just because you can use a video doesn’t necessarily mean that people are going to watch it. A nice photograph with a few bullet points to surmise might have made a better header. That said the Tory site looked fairly straightforward at a first glance. The links to the right of the video were concise topic points but didn’t seem to have much of a reason to be grouped together and lower down while the photo of the female, Asian Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action with a quote about integrating minority communities is probably there with the best of intentions I can’t help but feel a little cynical about it because there aren’t any other sound bytes from other ministers. The lower page layout involves lots of boxed items which again seem to be grouped oddly. The options to sign up for updates, join the party and look at some photos are grouped on one side while the option to join the Tory facebook appears on the other side below a large button to donate to the party. The lack of relevant grouping as well as the sensation that the Tory website designer is a little too fond of cramming in as much text as possible certainly doesn’t make it quite as appealingly laid out as the LibDem site.
The manifesto section of the site just bears out the wall of text issue and doesn’t look like something that’s been designed for public viewing. It has the kind of bare bones layout that makes it look more like Hansard than anything outside of specialist viewing. Interestingly there are two versions of the manifesto to download: one at a reasonable 3.04MB and another at a rather odd 77.04MB. I went with the smaller one first until I discovered that there are graphs that turn out rather blurry and hard to read with that version.
The last site I looked up was the Labour party one and was a little nonplussed to be greeting by a picture of David Cameron again at the top of it. There’s a little anti-Cameron slogan to go with it but at the top of your own party website I find it rather bad form. The site doesn’t appear to suffer from the grouping things randomly issue of the Tory site but I was disappointed to see that the actual policy segment was at the bottom of the page beneath things like Facebook links and Gordon Brown on Flickr. The Inside the Campaign section looks at a first glance like a Twitter feed which I’m pretty sure it isn’t and the list of links next to David Cameron’s picture aren’t exactly self-explanatory. There was only one mention of the manifesto on the main page and this came under the Latest News section which led to a short article about the manifesto with a link to go to the manifesto section of the site which struck me as a really roundabout way to get to the pertinent information.
The Labour manifesto page was something else entirely. I’m quite sure that when the main image was designed it must have seemed like a fantastic idea: a family looking towards a brighter future across the rolling English countryside. Unfortunately the style which struck me before I could even glance at the text seemed to be hailing the glorious revolution. There are some stylised images, some compositions that will always hark back to a prior, well-publicised usage of the same style and composition: a family in solid stock colours looking towards a rising sun across a stylised landscape is one of them. I’m only glad that they didn’t decide to set the scene in an industrialised locale. Other than that the manifesto was available via a simple button and a video was provided presumably to go through it in a concise online format if you so chose.
And as of my finishing writing this I still can’t get the larger version of the Tory manifesto to download so I may well have to do without whatever it was those charts were meant to be telling me.
The first site I looked at was the LibDem one which initially presented me with a simple choice between going to the specific manifesto section of the site or proceeding on to the general party site itself beneath a large picture of Nick Clegg presumably addressing a party conference. The main site featured a scrolling series of pictures at the top which while they moved a little quickly when they did change didn’t prove to be a huge distraction and could in fact be paused. While the pictures did generally feature Nick Clegg they show a variety of situations which were all applicable to his function as party leader. But what really impressed me was the clear, clean layout of the site. There were a variety of options on the left which focused on different policy areas, ways to sign up for local party involvement or e-mail updates on the right and a latest news update, a clickable list of parliamentary candidates and another link to the manifesto in the middle. Regardless of any LibDem future success the website designer is to be commended for making the sight straightforward to navigate.
There’s little else to say about the manifesto segment of the site for precisely the same reasons: the layout and range of information was clean, straightforward and wasn’t annoying to navigate.
Next I came to the Tory website replete with lots of blue and that awful scrawl of a tree that’s somehow become the Tory logo. The first thing that greeted me was what I initially took to be a rather unflattering picture of David Cameron that in fact turned out to be the first frame of a video. I didn’t bother watching it because if it’s anything like the videos I’ve seen before it’s just going to annoy me and even beyond that, just because you can use a video doesn’t necessarily mean that people are going to watch it. A nice photograph with a few bullet points to surmise might have made a better header. That said the Tory site looked fairly straightforward at a first glance. The links to the right of the video were concise topic points but didn’t seem to have much of a reason to be grouped together and lower down while the photo of the female, Asian Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action with a quote about integrating minority communities is probably there with the best of intentions I can’t help but feel a little cynical about it because there aren’t any other sound bytes from other ministers. The lower page layout involves lots of boxed items which again seem to be grouped oddly. The options to sign up for updates, join the party and look at some photos are grouped on one side while the option to join the Tory facebook appears on the other side below a large button to donate to the party. The lack of relevant grouping as well as the sensation that the Tory website designer is a little too fond of cramming in as much text as possible certainly doesn’t make it quite as appealingly laid out as the LibDem site.
The manifesto section of the site just bears out the wall of text issue and doesn’t look like something that’s been designed for public viewing. It has the kind of bare bones layout that makes it look more like Hansard than anything outside of specialist viewing. Interestingly there are two versions of the manifesto to download: one at a reasonable 3.04MB and another at a rather odd 77.04MB. I went with the smaller one first until I discovered that there are graphs that turn out rather blurry and hard to read with that version.
The last site I looked up was the Labour party one and was a little nonplussed to be greeting by a picture of David Cameron again at the top of it. There’s a little anti-Cameron slogan to go with it but at the top of your own party website I find it rather bad form. The site doesn’t appear to suffer from the grouping things randomly issue of the Tory site but I was disappointed to see that the actual policy segment was at the bottom of the page beneath things like Facebook links and Gordon Brown on Flickr. The Inside the Campaign section looks at a first glance like a Twitter feed which I’m pretty sure it isn’t and the list of links next to David Cameron’s picture aren’t exactly self-explanatory. There was only one mention of the manifesto on the main page and this came under the Latest News section which led to a short article about the manifesto with a link to go to the manifesto section of the site which struck me as a really roundabout way to get to the pertinent information.
The Labour manifesto page was something else entirely. I’m quite sure that when the main image was designed it must have seemed like a fantastic idea: a family looking towards a brighter future across the rolling English countryside. Unfortunately the style which struck me before I could even glance at the text seemed to be hailing the glorious revolution. There are some stylised images, some compositions that will always hark back to a prior, well-publicised usage of the same style and composition: a family in solid stock colours looking towards a rising sun across a stylised landscape is one of them. I’m only glad that they didn’t decide to set the scene in an industrialised locale. Other than that the manifesto was available via a simple button and a video was provided presumably to go through it in a concise online format if you so chose.
And as of my finishing writing this I still can’t get the larger version of the Tory manifesto to download so I may well have to do without whatever it was those charts were meant to be telling me.