So, after voting and watching the results come in till the early hours of the morning yesterday, I thought it might be a good idea to have a look at the political party websites to see what they look like/if they have been coded well. I’m not one to name names, but as we all know, there are those out there still coding like they still live in the 90′s; using tables for layout purposes (which we all know is a bad idea) and other bad coding/design techniques.

This could end up being a lengthy post, but who knows? It might give a good read.

Which Sites to look at?

Well, I don’t want to look at them all (as there are quite a few), so lets look at the main ones and one other for the comedy value it brings (take a guess which one…):

1. Labour
2. Conservative
3. Liberal Democrats
4. Scottish National Party (SNP)
5. British National Party (BNP)

I’m pretty much just going to go through the homepages of these sites and give my opinions of what I like or dislike about them (and try not to be bias towards my own political views).

Labour

Overall this isn’t a bad website. The main red colour seems a bit bright and overpowering to the rest of the design, but other than that the design is fairly good (in my opinion). I do quite like the JavaScript information changer at the top of the homepage, the fact they haven’t used Flash for this tells me that the person(s) who made this site knows better.

The coding itself could be worse, but it could be much better. There are 289 errors when the homepages XHTML is put through the w3c validator (and that’s with a transitional doctype), and the CSS has 39 errors. They seem to overuse div tags as well, even for things that really don’t need them (e.g. the links at the bottom of the page – each one is inside its own div, why? I have no idea). This is by far the worst website of the list coding wise.

Conservative

Green is usually a hard colour to pull off, but this site does it pretty well (I think combining it with the blue helps a lot). The rollovers on (most of) the links look pretty good, although there are still some links using the default style (the blue then purple once you’ve clicked them) which isn’t very good to have on a professional website. It also (obviously) uses a good grid system for its content, which makes the information on the page look better (or at least to me it does).

Aesthetically I like their logo best out of all the parties sites I have looked at here today, it wouldn’t be something that would make me vote for them, but it’s always nice to see nice logos out there.

Coding wise this is one of the better ones:

• It only has 1 error, 3 warnings when the HTML is put through the validator
• The code is nicely indented and very readable to anyone who wishes to do so (including screen readers)
• There are some onClick events happening throughout the page (which is bad practice to rely upon JavaScript), but not all the time
• There are lots of extra documents being included in the page, including 6 different CSS stylesheets, and 15+ JavaScript files

Overall an okay website that functions rather well for what it was made to do – show information.

Liberal Democrats

This was the only website (in this list) that passed the W3C validation process, and with a strict doctype I might add. The only problem I have with the code is that it isn’t very semantic and so isn’t very readable (code-wise), but still, it’s the only one that passes the validation so I think I’ll have to say that it’s acceptable (although not up to my own standards).

The design of the site seems a bit too cramped for me to like, a little more spacing between the content would work wonders on this site. Other than that the design is okay – the rollovers work okay, the links are styled (i.e. not default), the JavaScript banner works pretty well, it’s just the cramped content that puts me off it.

Scottish National Party (SNP)

Apart from the SNP’s sickly yellowish mustard colour I think this website is one of the better ones. Design wise it looks okay, using a nice grid system to display content and laying it out pretty easily for people to find. My only gripe about the design is that most of the links still use the default blue/purple (i.e.haven’t been styled), surely styling the default links is web design 101?

Coding wise the site isn’t the best (but isn’t the worst either):

• Put through the W3C validator there are 44 errors
• There seem to be around 15 CSS stylesheets (and none of them control the default links)
• It uses a Flash banner at the top when it could easily have done the same effect in JavaScript
• The coding is indented nicely – very readable to anyone who wishes to do so

Overall not the greatest website, but not the worst. Those default links really annoy me though.

British National Party (BNP)

This site has changed since I looked at it yesterday (while I was debating whether to make this post or not), but this new page has been built pretty much the same way; very badly. I only really wanted to have a look at this site to have a laugh, and it’s given me that. A few things I find wrong with it include:

• All the tags are in capitals
• It uses HTML and not XHTML
• The HTML has 38 errors, 5 warnings (which is a lot considering how small the page is).
• There is no favorites icon (favicon)
• Also, is it just me who thinks the woman looks like she has a black eye? I’m unsure what kind of message that is supposed to send out.

I have no doubts that this was just someone making a page quickly in dreamweaver and then generating the code from that. But even so, if it is a website on a political party like this then anything that goes onto it would surely be given to some kind of web professional to do?

Rounding off

Well, I’m fairly disappointed. I wanted to make this post and be able to completely slate most of the websites, but I think I may have been too cynical about them before I had a look. I was wrong (and that’s a good thing). The majority of the sites have been professionally made, using okay coding techniques and the designs (at least for informational sites like these) aren’t bad either. The code in most of the sites could be better, but that’s really only something a web developer (and whomever provides their hosting) would notice if it changed – they all function pretty well and I guess that is the main thing.

So, whats your opinion of the sites? Who’s site would you vote to be the best?

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