Election 2006 - Campaign Sites Day 2

A quick check of the primary party campaign sites gives no reason to change the rankings assigned yesterday. A couple of observations:

Conservative Party of Canada

Does the Conservative Party site really need two big, identical, images of Stephen Harper? If they need to fill this space, put some content in there!

This site continues to hold on to a last place finish among the major parties as:

• Macromedia Flash based content continues to dominate the site, leading to accessibility issues (more on this to subject to follow)
• responsiveness / performance remains poor – even in testing I found it painful to move from page to page
• Site failures not only continue to happen but the application code allows the public to see these failures in all their brutal uglyness:
  

On the plus side, accessibility-limiting Javascript links appear to have been removed. Hooray!

Liberal Party of Canada

24 hours into the campaign and this Fact Check link on the front page of the Liberal site still points to an page with no content!

NDP

NDP – error retrieving a page
The Conservative Party site is not the only one exposing application infrastructure problems and errors. The public should never see a page like this.

Why Not Flash

Why use Flash? Many browsers support it, and, properly designed, the use of Macromedia Flash can add a certain dynamism to a web site. Why not use it? Because only many browsers support it, not all.

Macromedia says that roughly 98% of all browsers have Flash installed; real world monitoring of server logs shows that penetration is much less than this. Does any political party really want to shut out even 5% of the people visiting the site? 10%? We hope not, but that’s exactly what the Conservative Party site designers have elected to do.

Consider the front page of the Conservative site at http://www.conservative.ca/ – in 800×600 resolution, Flash objects cover almost 100% of the page:

Conservative site – 800×600 resolution, on a browser with Flash unavailable

That, dear designers, is what 5, 10, or 15% of the browsers are seeing when they visit the Conservative Party of Canada official campaign web site.