Web Site Review #3b

Benjamin Melançon

Presidential Campaigns: George W. Bush

Topic

Purpose

The site clearly exists in order to help elect Bush to the presidency.  The strategy used in trying to obtain this goal often seems to be to convince people that Gore is worse than Bush rather than that Bush is desirable in any way, except that he will single-handedly usher in the age of responsibility.  Consider that unsolicited comment part of the discussion on the site’s content.

Source

Target Audience

Content

The Bush site contains information on the campaigns stand on the issues, information on how to circumvent campaign finance laws and contribute to the campaign, and press releases about the Bush campaign (positive ones) and the Gore campaign (negative ones).  Press releases or press-releasy type things dominate the content of the site, particularly the content most readily available.  There is still a reasonable amount on the issues, although specifics are mostly avoided, and somewhat less on how to get involved.

Interactivity: I’m going to say none.  The closest the Bush campaign’s site gets to accepting input from the user is to not actually reject getting e-mail.  After trying to divert people to e-mail the state campaigns instead through the persuasive use of exclamation marks, the user gets the following warm words of encouragement: “Thank you for your interest in contacting the Bush-Cheney 2000 Campaign. Your correspondence is appreciated.”

Site Plan & Navigation

The opening screen contains a minimum of content, instead providing a number of links to the content.  The organization of the content is far from examplary.  At one point they tell you that

At the top left corner of the Bush site, it says download.  Download what? I don't see any way to find out without clicking on the link.  This becomes a common problem on the site.

The opening page has no content, as mentioned, and is instead navigation.  Ultimately, the result is that there are multiple links for everything.

On the main page there are four ways to get to the voter registration page, three ways to get to the volunteer sign-up page under two different names, three ways to get to the sign-up page for the Bush News “e-train” (if your gonna use train imagery, pal, you’d better fund public transportation), and at least two ways each to get to the downloads page, to change the page to Spanish, get to GwBTV, use the tax calculator, go to state sites (under two different names), and just about everything else.  An interesting fact is that the least content has the most links.  About the only things not available through multiple links are Bush’s biographical information and the “Issue Breakdown.”  It’s eery.

The "Issues" link takes the user to an unnecessary intermediary screen that includes both a general (or 'themeless') "FAQ" and what a person who clicked on the link probably wanted in the first place: the "Issue Breakdown."

Once inside the “Issue Breakdown” section, the list of issues is displayed, some with one paragraph sort of giving Bush’s position and some without.  All, however, can be clicked on for more information.  This way of accessing the issues is far inferior to the Gore campaign site’s, where one or, depending on the way you count, two clicks separates you from your issue of choice.  To get to a Bush issue a user must click on “Issues,” select “Issue Breakdown” from the pop-up list, and more likely than not scroll down the randomly ordered page of issues to find any specific one.

If you click on an issue for more information, the navigation within a particular “Issue” is limited to going “Back” to where you were.  It has a button at the bottom of each which simply uses JavaScript to activate the “Back” capability of your browser.

One feature central to the navigation of the site is the pop-up menus for the primary site navigation down the left side.  In one case this feature really is a navigational aid, wherein the user can surmise that the information available under the heading “Bush-Cheney 2000” is probably personal information about the candidates and their families since the sub-headings are “George and Laura” and “Dick and Lynne.”  Usually it is not supplying more information about where the link takes the user but instead presenting more unexplained options.  When the user goes to click on “Get involved” and is presented with nine menu options instead, or goes to click on “News & Info” and gets six choices, what are they really expected to do?    A functionality issue with this navigation feature (aside from the problem of it not working at all in older browsers) is that it is apparently graphical, and on larger screens it becomes very small because it is pixel-based, while text stays slightly larger.

States: When you go to a state site, the sidebar still takes the user to sections of the main site, but it looks different. Even though visual continuity has been lost, the user is expected to know that clicking on "Issues," for example, will take her to the the same national issues page she may have already visited and not to a page on Florida's issues.

Visiting the “Youth Zone” comepletely dissociates the user from the regular navigation.

Links

Page Design

The page does not expand (or contract) to fit the screens width.  One must conclude that it, like Al Gore’s site, has been optimized for 800 by 600 screens and nobody else.

The navigation could take up overwhelming amounts of the page, largely because of blank space in and repeated links, but much of it would go away in certain content areas, such as "Issues."

The page has a lot of blank space that does not contribute to readability or even really to asthetics.

The only really, completely, and utterly useless thing on the page was this:

Always near the top, always doing nothing.

Page design, as mentioned, was not even close to consistent throughout the site.  The third column disappeared in most sections and everything changed for the states and the youth zone.

Creativity

The color scheme of the main page at the Bush for President site is black, yellow, and blue, of the exact shades shown here:

The main page displayed this GIF, embedded in a picture of the candidates.

Available for download were JPEGs of various sizes, including this one.

Functionality

Download Speed: www.georgewbush.com took fourteen seconds to display its content (test was conducted with the Opera browser and an ethernet connection).  Considering that this was with just about the fastest connection available the time it took is nearly unacceptable.  The sum total size of the files involved with displaying the opening page is 194 kilobytes.

Browser Compatibility:

• Netscape 4.73 - displays fine.
• Internet Explorer 5 - displays fine.
• Opera 4.02 - displays fine.
• Mosaic 3.0 and Lynx - the browser gets directed to a text only page which is moderately ugly in any browser.  I would link to the text only page, but I can't.  You have to make sure that your browser accepts cookies, go to the main site, and click on the “text only” link

“Post to form insecurely?  Submit warning: This form is being submitted without encryption. Do you want to continue?” These are warnings given by the Opera browser when simply choosing a voter outreach group or state to go to. I think that most browsers will only display this type of warning if you tell them to, but it is apparently unnecessary to have this mildly disturbing message ever appear, because the Gore site used forms and the warning never appeared while using the same browser.

Another thing about the forms on the Bush site were that they required an extra step to get to the places named in them.  This might really be more a question of user style than anything.  I found it annoying to have to click on a little arrow graphic, , whenever I wanted to actually go where I had already selected through a form (such as the “Language… English | Spanish” form).  I suppose it is possible that some people would prefer not to jump straight to the menu item they choose but have a chance to select a different one, but I am going to go with my preference and fault the Bush site for inserting an extraneous step.

The site flings cookies at the user like there’s no tomorrow to do the flinging.  Much worse, many functions of the site do not work without cookies.  Changing it to Spanish, for example, requires using cookies, as does changing it to text only, and using the video at “GWBtv.”  Even the quiz uses cookies, in a negative fashion— if you have cookies enabled and you get a wrong answer, it will inform you that you cannot try the quiz more than once a day.  Personally, I become uncomfortable when a web page tries to be so controlling.  I deleted the cookie files from my hard drive and tried another answer on the senseless quiz.  And you need cookies enabled to have a fighting chance of preventing the pop-up window from recurring.  Speaking of which…

Pop up windows are annoying.  Anyone will tell you this.  They are particularly annoying when, inevitably, George W.’s included, they appear half a second or so after the regular page finally loads.

Sometimes, a lot more than once, the page did not load.  This was most interesting when the site’s own automatic refresh would reload the page without asking and then not come back, hiding this message underneath its blackness:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80004005' [DBMSSOCN]
General network error. Check your network documentation. /Helper/SiteFunctions.asp, line 1477

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