David Politis has done a review of the websites of the six House candidates in Utah.  Candidate websites suffer from the same problems as other websites, public and private.  For example, apparently Jim Matheson was trying to use a web-based translation tool to translate his site into Spanish.  Problem is, the link doesn't work anymore.  Politis states,

I was also embarrassed for both Matheson and Swallow that their respective online calendars show nothing else between now and November 5.

This is one of the biggest problems with political websites, once they are developed no one maintains the content and it gets stale pretty fast.

Consider political candidates the next time you grip over how hard it was to find your last job. How many resumes did you send out? How many interviews did you do? Running for office is a huge commitment of time and someone else usually has the job already.

As the United States election season heats up, pay attention to political sites.

• Good ones make it easy for you to quickly figure out if you like this person on the issues, on career and life experience, and on their style and voice.
• They provoke you to feel, pushing buttons to wake your patriotism, fear, anger, hunger, and hope.
• They prompt you to take action, even if only to stay in touch by leaving your email address. Others let you pick your degree of involvement, from joining a mailing list, to volunteering a little, joining the campaign staff, donating a little, hosting a fund raiser, etc.
• They reinforce the candidate's brand: name, face, affiliation, tone, positioning.
• They repeat and emphasize how this candidate's future actions benefit you.

How well does your personal site support these design goals?

More on this through November.

[aka Bloggers for Hire]