I put in my local postcode… damn she is doing some serious touring!
Will come back with some more comments tomorrow…

I’ve absolutely no view about her candidacy one way or t’other, but that front page is a mess.

Sunny: yeah, she’s been all over the place (including up here) and doing it all by train too.

Mike, in terms of coding, or in terms of design? I quite like the layout, but obviously YMMV.

[3] Well, I like sites which, like this one, have their title at the top and fit onto my screen!

Mike, Jennie has a widescreen laptop, so it does fit on her screen. I concur with you though, it’s my principle complaint, the second being the TITLE tags make no sense and thus bookmarks and SERPs are going to be messed up.

But the site itself once you get past the frontpage is quite well put together overall, and her campaign strategy has been very good.

But then, when she started it, her then fiancé, now the Honorably Lady Mark said “I’ve adjudicated a lot of these things I thought I’d show people how I’d run a campaign” (he’s a party returning officer and is normally neutral in selections &c). So it shouldn’t surprise me that it’s going as well as it is. I wonder if anyone else (ie Lembit) will actually bother to run…

Oh those bl**dy wide-screen jobs, a classic example of demand creation. Things just don’t look right on them to me – isn’t there something called “the golden mean” which provides a clue to the most user-friendly shape of a flat object?

What’s wrong with the home page? No alt text on the images (and it’s almost *all* images, so there’s nothing on the home page for anyone browsing without images to latch on to). A home page that’s a lot more inaccessible and a lot less informative than the rest of the site, and has no visible navigation unless I enter a UK post code. It doesn’t say *why* it wants to know this, but just sits there grumpily insisting I enter a post code.

The *rest* of the site’s fine, but that home page put me right off. It looks like classic style over substance (which I know is a misleading picture of Ros Scott), and gives the impression of wanting to know stuff about me before telling me more, which gives me privacy hives, and if ever there was a button you shouldn’t push with Liberal activists, that’s it.

If you think that’s a usable web site, look at the home page in Lynx and weep (but please note that I think it gives a bad impression as a home page in Firefox with every extra turned on too). It’s a pity, because most of the rest of it is spot on, and if I’m honest, I’m only really giving it a hard time because so many bloggers seem to think the design’s great. That said, if I hadn’t been told by so many people that it was a good web site, I’d have looked at the home page, shrugged, and moved on.

Have to admit, I did notice the lack of alt tags this morning, which is unfortunate.

For a campaigning site it is deliciously purposeful and seems to successfully deter time-wasters. But for a generalist portal to engage and entertain the public… hmm

Her audience isn’t the public though. The public don’t vote in this election.

Thumbs up for actually embracing the year 2000 though, hopefully more politicians will follow suit.

The public may not vote in this election, but for the record I do. I don’t view accessibility for the partially-sighted (and anyone else inconvenienced by the lack of alt tags) as ‘time wasting’, but Ros isn’t likely to lose my vote over it, so maybe that is exactly what it is. As I said, I’m really only bothered because this is being touted as a model of good web design that others should follow.

An additional point: Google isn’t likely to index anything that only gives you meaningful content once you give it a post code (it’s possible the site’s authors have considered this, I realise, and serve different content to search bots). That doesn’t matter so much for a site that’s aimed at a small subset of people who can be told about it anyway, but anyone following this model who wants a wider exposure is going to get a nasty shock.

Lest I be seen only as an armchair critic, I’m happy to add alt tags to the source if someone gives me access, but I’m not at all sure anyone would be willing to do that to a random contributor to a blog thread.

David, while you’re right and it’s unlikely that you’d be given access, it is more than possible to pass your comments on to the site manager directly, which I’ll be doing later on this evening as I need to contact him on another matter anyway, so thanks for the critique, as you’re right on the ALT tags point, they are essential, especially for an image heavy front (which I’m personally not as keen on as I am on the inside content, but I’m a search/usability guy so you’d expect that)…