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The design isn’t bad, it doesn’t look as outdated as most.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.

They’re real people

The blog talks about real people who work in the company, like Alison, Ben, Ryan, James and Denym from Finance. You can tell that the people who work there have a really fun time. By putting up photos and quotes from each of the team, it gives the company a human touch and makes it seem more friendly and approachable. They even put up photos of company events, like their sports day.

And the shortest shorts competition was fearsome. And frightening. Fearsomely frightening.

Fun copy

Their copy is colloquial, light-hearted and self-deprecating at times. Here’s an excerpt from their knitted hat of the week” award.

Without further ado. The winner is……weirdly long pause…fumble with envelope…Big Bee Hive by Kerri from Essex.

They don’t just talk about carrots

The blog has stories on the sorts of things that people working in an office might talk about. Like what do you call the crust at the end of a loaf of bread? At the end of the article, they add “Tell us what you call the thick-bit-of-bread-at-the-end-of-the-loaf and the best name will win a breadbin full of smoothies and some toast (lightly buttered).” This encourages people to add comments, which is always good on a company blog.
At the end of their mailing list, they have some fun, unrelated links that people have sent in, like Youtube videos.

They are generous

As well as offering money-off vouchers to people who subscribe to their mailing list, Innocent also reward customers who write to them with suggestions.

Back in April when we launched our first ever banana free recipe – kiwis, apples and limes – we got in touch with everyone who’d ever written, emailed or called to ask us to make a smoothie without bananas and sent them a free voucher to have a bottle on us.

Useful information

Dr Shilpee is a regular writer on the Innocent blog, and she answers questions people send in about health matters and adds recipes. A bit like an agony aunt in a magazine. She adds credibility to the blog, as well as giving useful titbits of information.

Lots of photos

The photos the staff upload to the blog are rarely cheesy stock ones. They take pictures of their staff, customers and even sketches of new concepts and artwork.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind this sort of fun approach doesn’t appeal to everyone.

I have never read such awful label copy in my life. What are you on at Innocent. Do you really think this is funny and appeals to ‘normal people’. You have gone one step too far!!

Are there any blogs or mailing lists you subscribe to that you think get it right?

Nick Pellant did a stella talk about Building Your Company. I was worried it would overlap on the things mentioned in mine, but it didn’t at all. He seemed to cover everything that I didn’t have time to mention, and I was quite jealous of the way he presented while walking across the stage, without notes, whereas I stayed pretty much glued to the spot. He also had very few slides, meaning the attention was focused purely on what he was saying. His presentation style seemed to echo that of Ryan Carson (watch out Ryan) which is perhaps expected since Nick works in the same offices as Carsonified. He even gave out lovely free posters at the end which cover all the points he mentioned. These are handouts you don’t want to throw away. All in all, a great speaker and also very talented at his work.

Jamie Rumbelow did a talk about APIs which I was really impressed with. He’s 14 and seemed completely relaxed with talking about something quite complex to a room full of people. He is also very enthusiastic, and was asking me how he could help with Scrunchup. A very sound guy, and one to keep an eye on.

If you could buy stocks in teenagers, I would buy as many as I could in James Proud. This is an 18 year old guy who has his head well and truly screwed on. He gave a pitch about his project, Gig Locator, and blew away the audience and the panel. This guy knows exactly what he’s talking about. He knows his product really well, has good ties in his product’s industry, and keeps his two feet on the ground at all times. He’s business savvy and an engaging speaker, as well as having a really decent product. This guy is gold dust. Conference organisers take note.

Then there was Greg Cooper. Greg has made the decision to work purely in UI design for social networks, which is pretty smart in my opinion. As his specialism is quite niche, it will be really interesting to see what Greg is working on in the next few years. I’m sure he’ll be in hot demand by a lot of companies.
His presentation was really good, he touched on things like the importance of designing for the extremes – specifically designing how it would look if someone had a really long name which is something so many designers don’t think about.
Sadly, most people had left the conference before Greg started his talk, so not many people got to hear it. I guess this is the cost of making a conference free.

I enjoyed Charlie McDonnell’s talk a lot. It wasn’t about Web Design or Development, but about the life of a teenage YouTuber, which brought me back to my Media Studies days. If you haven’t heard of charlieissocoollike, check out his videos, specifically this one which is about tea. One of the interesting things he mentioned was that some of the things he is doing with agencies like the BBC is breaking ground in New Media, and him and these big organisations are on the same level, both trying different things and not quite sure what will happen.

I really enjoyed my time at the conference. It was great to catch up with Jon who came all the way from up North, and it was nice to be in a room full of like minded people of a similar age to me.  As with any conference in its first year, it has room for improvement, but I think it was a massive achievement that Rob and Grant managed to do it at all, and for free. The feedback from other attendees has been very positive, coming away with new contacts and ideas. And if inspiring a bunch of young people was their goal, they certainly achieved it, and I guess that’s all that really matters.

I’ve tried using Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla! and Mambo, and I’m not going to pretend this is better than them all.  It’s not, it just meets a different need.  Whereas CMSs such as Wordpress are great if you want to make a site with a blog, have the ability to add pages, plugins, and change themes, sometimes sites don’t need all that functionality.  Maybe on a 5 page site, you just want to be able to let the client change a few words every now and then, so a full-blown CMS can be a little overwhelming.

Here’s how CushyCMS works:

in your HTML file, you define the bits you want to be editable by adding class=”cushycms”

so a heading could be tagged as
<h1 class=”cushycms” title=”Heading”></h1>

and the editable content
<div class=”cushycms” title=”Main Content”></div>

Trying it out

I thought I’d give it a go with a small project I was working on.  It says it is standards compliant, and I had a look at the company that created it to reassure myself.  It’s built by Stateless Systems based in Australia www.statelesssystems.com and their other projects look quite interesting too: an alternative PDF viewer, a login sharing system to allow people to bypass web registration, and a coupon sharing site.

I created an account, typed in my FTP details, and browsed for the pages I’d given classes.  It seemed a little sluggish, but that may have been a slow connection at my end.  I would have liked to have been able to assign more than one page at a time, as selecting the file, waiting for it to load, and doing the process again seemed a little monotonous.

Editing Content

The pages I’d assigned displayed in a list with a little edit icon.  Clicking on this takes me to a form.  There is a field for each of the classes I’d assigned, and the interface looks quite similar to if I were sending an email, which is nice for less technically experienced clients.  I guess it could be compared to Contribute which is what I would have considered using instead.

At the moment, I’m labeled as ‘Designer’ in the menu, which I guess is Administrator.  I can assign editors to the site, and they get a stripped down version of what I can see.  As an editor I can’t add pages, but if I wanted to do that, I would be looking for a more functional CMS.

Assigning Editors

One thing that I wanted to do but couldn’t was to create more than one Administrator.  The administrator can assign many websites and editors to their account, but there can only be one administrator to each account.  I also can’t make multiple accounts with the same email address, which I suppose is to encourage people to upgrade to a Pro account (which costs $28 a month – around £15).  This lets you brand the CMS and have unlimited sites and editors.

The Prognosis

To sum up, I think CushyCMS is a great solution for small sites that don’t need content changed that often, as it gives the client more control.  Also, some CMSs make me feel quite restricted in how I design the site.  At the moment, I feel like I have to design sites around the CMS, but I prefer to design a site, and have the CMS integrate into it.  Maybe being able to do this comes with experience!

I’m tempted to take the plunge to Pro when I have enough of these types of projects to make it worthwhile.  I’d really appreciate your opinions on whether you think this is a good solution, or if it will turn my code into scrambled egg.

Isn’t it obvious that I’m putting off doing something more important?

Number 5 – Custard Creams

These are plain biscuits with a layer of cream in the middle which isn’t too sickly sweet. I like the pretty pattern they have on the outside too. They are perfect when dunked in tea because they don’t immediately go soggy.

Number 4 – Bourbons

Similar construction to custard creams, but with chocolate biscuit and filling. These are also lovely dunked in tea. They do go a bit mank if left open though!

Number 3 – Oreos

I used to find it almost impossible to get these anywhere in the UK, now they seem to sell them all over the place. These are dark chocolate biscuits with a custard-cream-like filling. In the US, they make loads of different flavoured ones, and even ones with double the filling! They’re quite expensive though, so nice as a treat!

Number 2 – The Pink Wafer Biscuit

Incredibly addictive. The biscuit consists of layers of pink wafer, sandwiched between layers of vanilla. The problem is they are very very moreish and I often find myself feeling ill after demolishing an entire packet because they’re so sweet.. Dipping them in tea can result in a lot of soggy pink stuff at the bottom of the mug.

Number 1 – Chocolate Caramel Digestives

These are immense! They take the chocolate digestive template, but have an inner layer of caramel, which really complements the chocolate and the biscuit components.

…that was way too many big words!

Every friend I have introduced these to has become completely obsessed with them. Sometimes we’ll have conversations like this:

“do you want to come round for a cup of tea?”

“..mmm… naahh, I’ve got some really important..”

“I’ve got caramel digestives…”

“OOHH! OK!”

Because of the properties of the caramel, the biscuit does not tend to crumble as much as others, but the chocolate is very melty and sticky (especially when dunked). Mmmmmmmmm……

So, what are your favourite biscuits?