Comparison of the UK’s political party websites
Mar '1028th
12
Government and political party websites are some of the worst designed out there, which is a shame because they often have a lot of important information to communicate. Last year we saw how a strong online presence so positively benefited Obama’s campaign and won the inspiration of many young people, an audience the media claims to be disillusioned with politics. I wanted to see how each of the main UK party websites compared, so I’ve done a comparison of the design and code of 4 of them (plus an extra minor party for the lols).
Please note I dislike each party equally, so no bias intended.
You can click on the images to see them full size.
Labour
I had some great criticisms lined up for Labour’s website, but they redesigned it halfway through writing this post. It’s a vast improvement on the previous one, although the code is a disappointment.
Design:
I think the new design is ok (compared to the others). It’s consistent, clear and easy to read. Although the drop-down navigation doesn’t work when JavaScript is disabled, the pages still link to the subpages so it degrades nicely.
Most of the website responds well when the text size is increased, but there are a lot of elements with fixed heights, making it difficult or impossible to read. The links below from the policies section could have so easily be made to expand when the text gets bigger.
Code
The structure of the code is good, but the choice of id and class names very poor. Some of the div ids are prefixed by the word “div”. It’s completely unnecessary. There are also lots of instances of div_a, div_b, li id="a", li id="b", id="small-column-left", so not very semantic code. There are far too many ids. On any site, especially this size or being maintained by other people, it is far better to use classes over ids. Ids are for addressable content and cannot be reused more than once on the same page. Classes are much more flexible and achieve the same result.
Overall impression
I spent half an hour on their site, and I still don’t know what they stand for. Protecting front line services? Who doesn’t have this as a policy… Also, longcat waffle like this isn’t helpful, I want bulletpoints. Although they have a lot written about general areas such as the economy and healthcare, I still don’t really know where they stand on each policy. Every party is pro education, pro healthcare and pro jobs, but it’s the little things that I want to know about. In their policies section they have a search box where you can search their policies. I think this is a really nice idea, but I want to know where Labour stand on things like abortion and euthanasia, both things I couldn’t find when I searched on their site.
Conservatives
Design
The design isn’t bad, it doesn’t look as outdated as most. However, this is just the homepage. The inner pages look very different. (How appropriate). The secondary navigation, and even some of the design is inconsistent throughout the site, making the website that much more difficult to use.
Code
Classes are reused nicely, and the navigation has access keys. Severe case of divitus though and a lot of JavaScript.
Overall impression
I’m disappointed by what initially looked to be a semi-decent website. My main frustration was that so many of their policies and manifestos were downloadable PDFs or fancy page-flip Flash rather than HTML pages. It’s just lazy.
Liberal Democrats
Design
When I first visited this site, I thought this was it. Oh right, it’s a splash page. Hello 1998.
You’ve got to have a little sympathy for the Lib dems for having the ugliest colour scheme – cyan and yellow. It’s very boxy and boring, and the photos are uninspiring. Mostly old men in suits wistfully pointing at things.
The big blue images with yellow text are repeated across the site, and often have really unhelpful alt text like alt="". There’s a lot of visual clutter and cliché stock images.
Code
Every div has an id prefixed by the word “div”. And if that isn’t enough, nested within #divTop, we’ve got #divTopLeft, #divTopCentre and #divTopRight. And within #divTopCentre we’ve got #divTopCentreTop and #divTopCentreBottom. Blimey.
Overall impression
A really average site. The “what we stand for” navigation menu is useful, but there really is too much to look at on one page.
Green
Design
I’m personally not keen on the Green party’s website design. To me it feels like a hippy local newspaper site. It’s very blocky, things don’t align, and the link styles are too close to the normal text style.
Code
The code is along the same lines as the Lib dem website. Lots of unsemantic ids and classes like “left” and “right”. I don’t understand why they’ve bothered putting a “Validate XHTML” link on the site since it doesn’t actually validate.
Overall impression
I expected a little more from the Green party as they seem to be quite ahead with technology and are very popular with students. Saying that, their candidate MP Caroline Lucas’s site is really quite nice. I just wish they used that same style on the main site.
British National Party
I was going to avoid the BNP since I don’t consider them to be a proper political party, but their website is so ridiculous I thought I’d put them in here to win the wooden spoon award. If you haven’t heard of them, their policies are far-right, anti-immigration, anti foreign aid and pro capital punishment. Some public sector workforces such as the police ban membership from the party.
Design
It seems ironic that the BNP’s website is so similar *coughplagiarisedcough* to the Obama website.
The image on the left is the BNP website. The image on the right is Obama’s website. Hmmm…
Have a closer look at the buttons. Drop shadows, reflections, bevels, stripes, gradients. Yep, these buttons have it all.
I found this on their immigration policy website. Note the guy at the front with the RPG. Just a wild guess that this is photoshopped.
Code
The site is a hybrid of divs, more divs, break tags and tables. The only heading level is an h2.
Overall impression
The design is completely ripped off and has a bad case of photoshop vomit. The code is average and needs more heading levels to be semantic. The navigation wraps onto 2 lines, and the site generally looks like it was designed in Microsoft Publisher.
Summary
Too many of the party sites only had a vague list of their policies. A shopping list style of policies with links to more information on each one would be very useful. And it’s not just education and healthcare that people care about. They want to know the things like whether their party is pro euthanasia, pro abortion or pro same sex marriage, but too many parties shy away from doing this in case it turns voters off. Vague lists are meaningless and only serve to confuse potential voters.
Considering the success of Obama’s political campaign which had such a strong online emphasis, I expected the UK politcal parties to respond by improving their online experiences, but they’re disappointingly behind. They may not have as big budgets, but it’s a very effective form of marketing when it’s done right.
12 Comments on “Comparison of the UK’s political party websites”
March 29th, 2010 at 9:40 am
Funny you should mention that the BNP party site was a rip-off of Obama’s site, as I hadn’t noticed. The only thing I noticed was that the logo was similar to one used by a professional wrestling organization I used to work for!
See http://www.amerchandise.co.uk/store/images/uploads/1pw%20logo%20white.jpeg for the proof…
March 29th, 2010 at 9:43 am
Very interesting comparison. I’ve just created a website for a friend standing as an independent candidate and it’s made me really think about how online media is being used for getting policy ideas across and ‘exciting’ potential voters to support a particular cause.
I’m surprised to see that they are all achieving fairly average online experiences still.
March 29th, 2010 at 10:06 am
Good write-up Anna.
I don’t think there is a single example of a decent, aspirational or inspirational website amongst the primary British parties. This is such a shame given the way the medium was embraced in the American Presidential elections.
On this side of the pond it just seems to be another way of regurgitating the same, tired message rather than being used to really try and engage with voters (aside from the usual obligatory ‘so-shul meeja’ twitter, flickr and facebook links).
The Conservatives at least seem to have done something different until you look at their site side-by-side with http://www.mcfc.co.uk/ where they have essentially ripped-off the same layout design but royally fucking up any of the functionality.
March 29th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Thanks for the write up Anna. I always find myself doing the same thing with the printed brochures which come round at election time: essentially just critiquing/weeping over the design and wondering at what point in the process the useful information got forgotten. I think I was so disheartened by these failed design attempts I couldn’t bring myself to look at their websites, and the result of your survey hasn’t given me any regrets!
I expected so much more. I heard some politician or civil servant on the radio talking about how they were going to take their cue from the Obama campaign and be using the web in interesting ways to try and win votes. He mentioned a couple specific activities: how they would ask people to donate their Facebook status and how they would buy up google adwords for the latest news topics (as soon as they break), so that when people went to find out about a particular story, they’d see ads for X party. I not entirely sure how the latter idea would work exactly, but it did at least sound like they are working with people who know the web. It’s a shame this doesn’t come across in their website design (including the websites’ architecture and content strategy).
You are absolutely right about the need for some short texts or bullet points on the Labour website. I thought maybe I’d found this on the Labour site when I found some “At a glance” links down the side but they just link to more lengthy pages of text, not even a subheading in sight. The Conservatives do this a bit better.
They might not have as big a budget as the Obama campaign, but they easily have enough to commission a decent website, considering how much they’ve spent on advertising and campaigns in the past.
March 29th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Really interesting post, good comments on the design and you obviously know your code. I’d say the conservatives was the best although that doesn’t really say much. Labour’s is just plain boring and the Tory’s is cool and clean (The phrase wolf in sheeps clothing seems to come to mind when I think about the Tories). I’m disappointed in the Lib Dems and Greens – I was expecting a lot more. I’ve never been on the BNPs site before, I quite liked it when I first glanced it but you’re right – I can’t believe it’s such a rip off of the Obama website! Now that is irony.
March 29th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
I think the Lib Dems are right to use alt=”" rather than alt=”some generic patronising stock photography”. It makes for better accessibility.
Nice to see fascists are crap at web design. I bet at least proper Nazis would have a good website. Their color scheme was decent at least, for the 40′s.
It’s much the same case in the US, with the teabagging-obsessed GOP ( http://www.gop.com/firepelosi/ ) falling way behind the Dems ( http://www.democrats.org/ ) in web design quality.
April 6th, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Hi Anna, nice write-up and pretty much spot on agree with you. On a technical point though,
alt=""is generally a good thing. Most of the time the images are actually decorative rather than informative, and ought to be skipped over by a screen reader. Having a blank alt attribute ensures that a screen reader skips over the image silently, instead of reading the image’s filename. Of course, images that contribute semantic content should have a viable alt string.As for the site’s – it speaks volumes about all of them. Not a single party has a cohesive vision for Britain, not a single party can communicate effectively with people, and every one is more about image than content. Not one party understands that if you talk like an adult, treat people as though they have a brain, and don’t “be seen to take stances” or posture – you’ll get a lot more attention and taken a lot more seriously. We don’t all read the tabloids, we don’t need or want to be treated like ignorant children.
April 10th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Hey Matt, Ian,
Really fair point you both made about using
alt=""on decorative images. I actually hadn’t thought of this. Many of the images I’d looked at without had text in them, but maybe they didn’t think the message was important enough to put it in the alt tag!April 15th, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Hi Anna, really fantastic article especially now. I am not suprised at any of these results. One thing I would be interested in is finding out which CMS’s the websites were being driven by ?
April 28th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
I agree Caroline Lucas’s site is so much nicer than the Green Party’s website, nicer than all of the sites featured here in fact! In my opinion anyway.
That abysmal attempt at Photoshop by the BNP designer for the immigration banner cracks me up every time :D
Has anyone checked out his own website? The BNP is the first piece in his portfolio, and what is that background music?? Jeez!
May 20th, 2010 at 8:24 am
I was talking to some guys last night @FOWD and they mentioned the BNP site had been taken down because the ‘web designer’ hadn’t been paid…
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