In my first dKos diary entry (hi guys!), I wax poetic about the sad state of my local Democratic Party website. Looking like it stumbled out of a time capsule, the page is a mess of broken links, poor information layout, and, horror of horrors, animated gifs of 3d donkeys dancing around. Is this common nationwide, and if so, is there any movement to redesign the Democratic Party's internet face?
Heavy edit: Took out any reference of me running for office, because, frankly, I'm not going to anymore, so you can stop flaming me. Jesus Christ, take off your partisan hats for half a second.
The REAL point of this post is to talk about the bad website design local dem sites have. Could we maybe talk about that?
I'll admit, I joined Dailykos as a fierce independent (albeit a far-left-leaning one). I'm now leaning more towards joining the Democratic Party, though. Seeing as Republicans make me foam at the mouth and roar uncontrollably, the Dems are a solid first choice. ;)
The problem is, I'm a nethead. A real web 2.0 geek. I blog, I flickr, I friendfeed, I twitter. I have a Facebook, and a Myspace. I'm about as plugged in as you get. So, as if by instinct, naturally I google up the local Democratic party website.
And almost throw up in my mouth.
Monroe County, Michigan Democratic website
Pulled straight from 1998, the website's a mishmash of poor branding, cluttered information, and atrocious linking. The animated donkey would have been awesome, in 1996.
In theory they have a blog, but the Blogger link goes to an empty profile with no posts. The "join" button is hidden in the mess of links, and going there simply takes me to MichiganDems.com, a slightly better, but still terrible website (the "get local" button returns a 404 not found error... classy, and delicious).
In short, the design is rotten. And this makes me sad, because I can imagine many less net-savvy people who would want to get curious and involved in the political process, getting turned off by the mess laid out in their browser.
Would it kill my local party to use an off-the-shelf setup, like Wordpress? Or Drupal? Or whatever DKos runs off of? Off the shelf might seem like cheating, but millions of people use those packages for a reason: they work, and they work well. Information is well organized, the design looks modern, and updating it is easy even for non-netheads (once you're running, Wordpress is as simple as clicking the "post" button).
Is it like this everywhere else on the local websites? Should someone be organizing a grassroots "redesign our websites" campaign?
First impressions are everything. If users are getting frustrated trying to do something as simple as look up basic info, it's time to clear the drawing board and start over.