Okay, so umm, this is me being both a nit picking web designer and political. (Brendan still has not set up that nifty guest bloging feature yet so comments shall have to do).
Lets preface this with something that happened months ago at the SCendoff (stupid name I know, it is a USC thing) where I met the parent of a USC alumni that is, low and behold, a web designer that builds websites for campaigns. The e-mail address for this particular person was placed in a drawer given the fact that they do Republican websites and are quite admit about hiring good Republicans to work for them so I stuck the address in a drawer knowing a) it would never amount to anything and b) it would drive me nuts to work there. So anyway fast forward four and a half months.
Tonight I was cleaning my room (something about Brendan coming down to this area, although he has yet to provide any details (nudge nudge hint hint) and I ran across the e-mail address and decided to pull up the home page.
All right, so the home page was poorly coded using mid 90’s image map splash pages and other long defunct design techniques. However, this is fully understandable, you are busy the last site to get attention is you own when you are busy working on web projects. So I decided to check out some client pages. The most recent of which is the re-elect Bush site.
So, I bit the bullet and “checked out” the Bush site. Now the first thing I noticed was that the design is to be nice about it crap. First problem: the site width is set to 936 px. Now for those scoring at home you need a 17 inch CRT monitor to be able to view the page without horizontal scrolling. Which is bad for accessibility. And the width is hard set in a table layout (also bad). Now I have no specific problem with fixed width sites. They can be used to limit the width to easy reading of text and lock down the design. And a 640 fixed width is outdated. But the standard for a fixed width is 800 px (about a 15 inch CRT) not 1024.
Okay, so that is a minor annoyance. Second thing is the site has a poor layout out. There is a serious information overload on the home-page, a veritable sea of short text snippets, pictures, and links. And the site squanders bandwidth in a rats nest of code and superfluous graphics (read waists campaign contributions, but this is not a really big issue for Bush) and uses graphical roll overs where simple CSS rules would suffice.
Scanning the code it did not look very good, but I did my standard open the site into Lynx accessibility test (not fool proof for some of the more esoteric things, but it is very effective at catching egregious errors and getting a feel for how accessible the site is to the disabled.) The site royally flunked accessibility standards (Read does satisfy US code section 508 for government websites) Which it technically does not need to pass. But it shows the priority that the campaign places on helping the disabled feel welcomed to their site and their campaign.
And the final step was running the site through the Wc3’s html validation service. It flunked with 841 html errors (there were only 831 lines of code in the whole site).
Suffice to say the site was not too good. This got me to thinking, what the other Presidential sites look like? Are they any better than the Bush site?
Well, it seems that all the major campaign sites are stuck in code from the mid 90’s browser wars.
For example Dean’s site uses an incomplete doctype, and then the rest of the sites coding does not match the doctype. It is mix of XHTML 1.0 and HTML 3.2 witch I must admit was kind of funny. There is also a sea of nested table in the site.
The external design is better, and fits just this side of 800px, It is also fixed width but use a more digestible three column layout and a passable organization of links. It still squanders bandwidth on superfluous graphics. There is a bit more CSS behind the curtain but it is not terribly well integrated with the rats nest of tables. The Lynx test comes within striking distance of 508 compliance but falls a few feet short, mostly it is missing navigation skip links, but does a much better job using alt attributes to provide a more accessible user experience. The W3C validation comes up with 199 errors in 733 lines of code. which is a bit better.
The Liberman site suffers from similar issues to the dean site and loads like a cart of molasses in Connecticut in January. But unlike the others is also suffers from disastrous spewing of dreamweaver code (explains the lode time.) and it is also pretty bad on the accessibility front.
Carol Moseley Braun’s site is okay, loads fast and does not use excessive images. But could use CSS to better advantage in the layout of the page, and improve accessibility (which is worse than the Bush site and that has site has piss poor accessibility). The Problem here is the design is just dull and kind of, well boring. There is just nothing to grab you. Instead of information overload there is almost an information under-load. I am pleased that they use PHP for some of the page structure.
So how about that Dennis Kucinich cahp? Well he also uses PHP (can you tell I like PHP, open source standards and all :)) He gets part way there with a good CSS site, but falls a bit short. He uses graphics effectively in places but some of them are a bit “poor” in quality. Layout is acceptable, but not terribly accessible. Not quite as good as the Dean site but better than Bush.
Of course the Dick Gephardt site certainly takes the prize for Irony. on the home page he says:
As President of the United States, I will not rest until every person with a disability is treated with the same honor, dignity, and respect that Americans without disabilities enjoy.
However, loading into Lynx he does not get as close to passing accessibility standards as Dean. Mainly he has alt attribute and menu issues (the two key tenants of accessibility) He does make a very good use of graphics and avoids using extraneous ones. However, it still has a strong table layout that expends bandwidth. Overall it is a fairly well designed site. Sadly it falls short on accessibility, this lead to a great deal of laughter on my part.
John Kerry’s site is a bit of a rats nest of tables. However, it does okay as far as accessibility, about as good as Dean, arguably a bit better but I am fairly certain that the differences were random. Alt attributes are used and links are done in styled plan text saving graphics and bandwidth. I also kind of like the look of the resultant design. So thus far I would say Kerry is in the lead for best site.
Wesley Clark’s site also suffers from a few problems. The accessibility is all-right, but is missing alt attributes and navigation elements. Good with some text based menus, but could do more. and of course the obligatory Dremweaver mess of tables and javascript, placing the site in that great middle of the pack area.
Okay, Right off the bat Sharpton looses points for a bad auto forward set up. Kudos for liquid widths allowing resizing for screen width. and okay on the navigation. Still lots of tables, and issues with accessibility. Problems with alt text but the semantic setup is better. Enough to place it a little ahead of average, but the redirect drops it to near the back of the pack.
So far Democratic candidates have been listed in the order that I have remembered them off the top of my head. I always forget who the ninth one is though. (What does that say for John Edwards’ chances when someone who can remember eight out of nine candidates (and all nine supreme court justices) can’t remember your name? And he was supposed to be some kind of a front runner. Oh well, perhaps now I shall remember him better.
As for his website. Okay, well he automatically fails for use of the Marque tag. He is the only one that uses it and, for those that don’t understand the travesty think epileptic fits for IE for windows users, and it is plain annoying for the rest of us. That is certainly enough to get an automatic F for accessibility. But lest we forget, the code is rats nest of tables and poorly coded tags with inconstant case use and missing quotation marks a plenty. The code is a mess. He does manage to use proper alt attributes but no jump menu. This would put him all the way up with Dean for accessibility if not for the idiotic marque tag. There is also a massive waist of bandwidth on menu graphics that could easily be done with text and CSS. The overall design is mediocre and borders on garishly ugly. It certainly resembles something out of the mid 90 browser wars. Also the biggest of ironies in the site. There is a Text size adjuster widget (a major plus for an accessible site) however, the only thing it effects the size on is that damn marque element. That was funny.
So where does this leave us?
Well, I suppose it leaves us with the realization that basically all of the presidential websites are terrible as far as semantic websites go. use bandwidth, graphics and CSS poorly and have varying levels of poor accessibility with none meeting the barest essentials of 508 compliance. Some have better navigation systems than others and some have more attractive home-pages but in the end none is significantly better than any of the others.
So where do we go from here? I don’t know, I’m avoiding cleaning my bed room.
I have a 17″ laptop flatscreen monitor and I have never had any trouble with the GeorgeWBush.com site. It’s a bit cluttered but everything is easy to find and use, so I have no complaints.
My reaction to your analysis? Well I suppose it appears that the quality of the candidate’s site is inversely proportional to their chance of winning next November. No?
I duno, the Sharpton and Edwards sites were not very good, perhaps worse than Bush’s, and I don’t think ether of them stands a snowballs chance of winning. They are basically a tight little group of mid 90s design. I think cluttered is an apt description of the Bush site. As for you monitors size. Yes 1024 x768 is a very common screen resolution theses days. Especially with the advent of LCD screens and the ensuing price drop in their cost. However, 800×600 is still fairly common and needs to be kept in mind. In the case of the Bush site a good liquid design would do wonders. You could develop the site so that on wide monitors you would get two (or even three or four) of those short blocks across, and then on narrower monitors two or fewer, giving space for that hanging third column. heck, you could develop different style sheets for different resolutions, but that kind of defeats their purpose.
December 29th, 2003 at 2:56:59 pm
well, we know two things. You can post from your TV and you are just a little crazy.
December 29th, 2003 at 5:20:59 pm
Yes, but only one of these things was previously in doubt. :)
December 29th, 2003 at 8:47:36 pm
Did you say WebTV? Next you will be using a PCjr.
Click on this link and scroll down.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ttzd/20031223/tc_techtues_zd/115253&cid=1739&ncid=1729
December 29th, 2003 at 9:56:12 pm
Hahaha, good call Dane.
December 29th, 2003 at 11:54:47 pm
“…just a little crazy.”
An understatement, some might claim. :) / But — we like the Web TV. We do. As our NYC link, it Works fer Us.
Love, - The Brendan’Rents
December 30th, 2003 at 12:58:44 am
Okay, so umm, this is me being both a nit picking web designer and political. (Brendan still has not set up that nifty guest bloging feature yet so comments shall have to do).
Lets preface this with something that happened months ago at the SCendoff (stupid name I know, it is a USC thing) where I met the parent of a USC alumni that is, low and behold, a web designer that builds websites for campaigns. The e-mail address for this particular person was placed in a drawer given the fact that they do Republican websites and are quite admit about hiring good Republicans to work for them so I stuck the address in a drawer knowing a) it would never amount to anything and b) it would drive me nuts to work there. So anyway fast forward four and a half months.
Tonight I was cleaning my room (something about Brendan coming down to this area, although he has yet to provide any details (nudge nudge hint hint) and I ran across the e-mail address and decided to pull up the home page.
All right, so the home page was poorly coded using mid 90’s image map splash pages and other long defunct design techniques. However, this is fully understandable, you are busy the last site to get attention is you own when you are busy working on web projects. So I decided to check out some client pages. The most recent of which is the re-elect Bush site.
So, I bit the bullet and “checked out” the Bush site. Now the first thing I noticed was that the design is to be nice about it crap. First problem: the site width is set to 936 px. Now for those scoring at home you need a 17 inch CRT monitor to be able to view the page without horizontal scrolling. Which is bad for accessibility. And the width is hard set in a table layout (also bad). Now I have no specific problem with fixed width sites. They can be used to limit the width to easy reading of text and lock down the design. And a 640 fixed width is outdated. But the standard for a fixed width is 800 px (about a 15 inch CRT) not 1024.
Okay, so that is a minor annoyance. Second thing is the site has a poor layout out. There is a serious information overload on the home-page, a veritable sea of short text snippets, pictures, and links. And the site squanders bandwidth in a rats nest of code and superfluous graphics (read waists campaign contributions, but this is not a really big issue for Bush) and uses graphical roll overs where simple CSS rules would suffice.
Scanning the code it did not look very good, but I did my standard open the site into Lynx accessibility test (not fool proof for some of the more esoteric things, but it is very effective at catching egregious errors and getting a feel for how accessible the site is to the disabled.) The site royally flunked accessibility standards (Read does satisfy US code section 508 for government websites) Which it technically does not need to pass. But it shows the priority that the campaign places on helping the disabled feel welcomed to their site and their campaign.
And the final step was running the site through the Wc3’s html validation service. It flunked with 841 html errors (there were only 831 lines of code in the whole site).
Suffice to say the site was not too good. This got me to thinking, what the other Presidential sites look like? Are they any better than the Bush site?
Well, it seems that all the major campaign sites are stuck in code from the mid 90’s browser wars.
For example Dean’s site uses an incomplete doctype, and then the rest of the sites coding does not match the doctype. It is mix of XHTML 1.0 and HTML 3.2 witch I must admit was kind of funny. There is also a sea of nested table in the site.
The external design is better, and fits just this side of 800px, It is also fixed width but use a more digestible three column layout and a passable organization of links. It still squanders bandwidth on superfluous graphics. There is a bit more CSS behind the curtain but it is not terribly well integrated with the rats nest of tables. The Lynx test comes within striking distance of 508 compliance but falls a few feet short, mostly it is missing navigation skip links, but does a much better job using alt attributes to provide a more accessible user experience. The W3C validation comes up with 199 errors in 733 lines of code. which is a bit better.
The Liberman site suffers from similar issues to the dean site and loads like a cart of molasses in Connecticut in January. But unlike the others is also suffers from disastrous spewing of dreamweaver code (explains the lode time.) and it is also pretty bad on the accessibility front.
Carol Moseley Braun’s site is okay, loads fast and does not use excessive images. But could use CSS to better advantage in the layout of the page, and improve accessibility (which is worse than the Bush site and that has site has piss poor accessibility). The Problem here is the design is just dull and kind of, well boring. There is just nothing to grab you. Instead of information overload there is almost an information under-load. I am pleased that they use PHP for some of the page structure.
So how about that Dennis Kucinich cahp? Well he also uses PHP (can you tell I like PHP, open source standards and all :)) He gets part way there with a good CSS site, but falls a bit short. He uses graphics effectively in places but some of them are a bit “poor” in quality. Layout is acceptable, but not terribly accessible. Not quite as good as the Dean site but better than Bush.
Of course the Dick Gephardt site certainly takes the prize for Irony. on the home page he says:
However, loading into Lynx he does not get as close to passing accessibility standards as Dean. Mainly he has alt attribute and menu issues (the two key tenants of accessibility) He does make a very good use of graphics and avoids using extraneous ones. However, it still has a strong table layout that expends bandwidth. Overall it is a fairly well designed site. Sadly it falls short on accessibility, this lead to a great deal of laughter on my part.
John Kerry’s site is a bit of a rats nest of tables. However, it does okay as far as accessibility, about as good as Dean, arguably a bit better but I am fairly certain that the differences were random. Alt attributes are used and links are done in styled plan text saving graphics and bandwidth. I also kind of like the look of the resultant design. So thus far I would say Kerry is in the lead for best site.
Wesley Clark’s site also suffers from a few problems. The accessibility is all-right, but is missing alt attributes and navigation elements. Good with some text based menus, but could do more. and of course the obligatory Dremweaver mess of tables and javascript, placing the site in that great middle of the pack area.
Okay, Right off the bat Sharpton looses points for a bad auto forward set up. Kudos for liquid widths allowing resizing for screen width. and okay on the navigation. Still lots of tables, and issues with accessibility. Problems with alt text but the semantic setup is better. Enough to place it a little ahead of average, but the redirect drops it to near the back of the pack.
So far Democratic candidates have been listed in the order that I have remembered them off the top of my head. I always forget who the ninth one is though. (What does that say for John Edwards’ chances when someone who can remember eight out of nine candidates (and all nine supreme court justices) can’t remember your name? And he was supposed to be some kind of a front runner. Oh well, perhaps now I shall remember him better.
As for his website. Okay, well he automatically fails for use of the Marque tag. He is the only one that uses it and, for those that don’t understand the travesty think epileptic fits for IE for windows users, and it is plain annoying for the rest of us. That is certainly enough to get an automatic F for accessibility. But lest we forget, the code is rats nest of tables and poorly coded tags with inconstant case use and missing quotation marks a plenty. The code is a mess. He does manage to use proper alt attributes but no jump menu. This would put him all the way up with Dean for accessibility if not for the idiotic marque tag. There is also a massive waist of bandwidth on menu graphics that could easily be done with text and CSS. The overall design is mediocre and borders on garishly ugly. It certainly resembles something out of the mid 90 browser wars. Also the biggest of ironies in the site. There is a Text size adjuster widget (a major plus for an accessible site) however, the only thing it effects the size on is that damn marque element. That was funny.
So where does this leave us?
Well, I suppose it leaves us with the realization that basically all of the presidential websites are terrible as far as semantic websites go. use bandwidth, graphics and CSS poorly and have varying levels of poor accessibility with none meeting the barest essentials of 508 compliance. Some have better navigation systems than others and some have more attractive home-pages but in the end none is significantly better than any of the others.
So where do we go from here? I don’t know, I’m avoiding cleaning my bed room.
December 30th, 2003 at 3:24:24 am
I have a 17″ laptop flatscreen monitor and I have never had any trouble with the GeorgeWBush.com site. It’s a bit cluttered but everything is easy to find and use, so I have no complaints.
My reaction to your analysis? Well I suppose it appears that the quality of the candidate’s site is inversely proportional to their chance of winning next November. No?
December 30th, 2003 at 8:37:36 am
I duno, the Sharpton and Edwards sites were not very good, perhaps worse than Bush’s, and I don’t think ether of them stands a snowballs chance of winning. They are basically a tight little group of mid 90s design. I think cluttered is an apt description of the Bush site. As for you monitors size. Yes 1024 x768 is a very common screen resolution theses days. Especially with the advent of LCD screens and the ensuing price drop in their cost. However, 800×600 is still fairly common and needs to be kept in mind. In the case of the Bush site a good liquid design would do wonders. You could develop the site so that on wide monitors you would get two (or even three or four) of those short blocks across, and then on narrower monitors two or fewer, giving space for that hanging third column. heck, you could develop different style sheets for different resolutions, but that kind of defeats their purpose.
April 14th, 2006 at 11:20:47 pm
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