House Race Jeers, Cheers And Website Tips
The PIM staff has completed our 2008 Minnesota House Races index, and we've reviewed the good, the bad and the ugly campaign websites.
The bad, the ugly and the funky:
The good ones we liked:
Some suggestions from PIM staff:
Without the right tools, Web development is a hit-or-miss, trial-and-error affair. Make a tweak, save, upload, see if it worked. Then, of course, it might render differently in different browsers.
Here are our free must-have tools for successful Web tweaks: Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 is now out, and it's quick and reliable. There are many add on extensions for developers, but two of them are crucial. The Web Developer toolbar creates twelve drop-down menus that control all aspects of Web display. Our favorite feature draws boxes to show the otherwise invisible layout elements on the page, eliminating a colossal amount of guesswork. It also can validate the code, analyze forms, cookies, images, and help manage a myriad of other small items that are a pain to determine manually.
Firebug creates a panel that lets you, the harried part-time developer, make live tweaks to the style sheets and HTML, so you can see right away what each change does. (The changes are only made within Firefox's representation of the site, not the real site itself, so your experiments won't affect what the public sees.) It also helps debug JavaScript problems, tells you if individual files are loading slowly and shows syntax errors in code.
To see how various browsers and operating systems display your site differently (always a bane), this article at Smashing Magazine has many tips. The free IE NetRenderer shows several versions of Internet Explorer at once. BrowserShots.org shows a ton of different browsers, but you have to wait for a few minutes unless you pay a few bucks. Litmus is an advanced tool that also shows how different email clients present emails. BrowserCam.com is a fancy pay service with some extra features, much like BrowserPool. We're most impressed with the ease of the free BrowserShots.
The bad, the ugly and the funky:
- Tim Hafvenstein, GOP challenger to 8A's Rep. Bill Hilty (DFL-Finlayson), has a virtually unmodified Microsoft Frontpage template (hafvensteincampaign.com). Besides the title, it's totally unchanged, no contact info or anything.
- In 9A, Rep. Morrie Lanning's (R-Moorhead) site (morrielanning.com) is decidedly straight out of 1996. It's not glitchy, but it looks out of date, and hasn't been updated since March. (The contrast is with his opponent, below.)
- Mike LaMieur, Rep. Al Doty's (DFL-Royalton) challenger in 12B, has a site (mikelemieur.com) with a decidedly funky look, and unlike many, dares to feature a photo of President George W. Bush, who is rarely spotted on GOP campaign sites these days. LaMieur also needs to create lower-resolution photos of himself in the middle: currently they slowly load as giant, forcibly resized JPEGs.
- Independent candidate Daniel Sweeney, challenging Rep. Rob Eastlund (R-Isanti) in 17A, has a lot of typos to clean up (ivotemn.net), though his interesting proposal to let his constituents directly control his votes deserves some notice.
- Dr. Dave Detert, Rep. Dean Urdahl's (R-Grove City) DFL challenger in 18B, (detertfor18b.homestead.com) has a very old look to it, and also needs to add HTML title attributes to the pages. The content is substantive, but it looks strange (a 1990s style rotating email link, for example) and clicking around the site opens new windows each time, which is not needed.
- Jim Bakula, Rep. Bruce Anderson's (R-Buffalo Twp.) DFL challenger in 19A, has a pretty average setup, (jimbakula.com) but the menu across the top does not work. We really like his central photo rolling through a parade on a campaign Segway! "Time to move in a new direction," indeed! Anderson, on the other hand, has no website whatsoever. (The PiPress' Rachel Stassen-Berger noted that Anderson registered his official House email address as his campaign email address, which might be a campaign violation if it's used to solicit contributions, etc.)
- Sharon Anderson, one of Rep. Erin Murphy's (DFL-St. Paul) GOP opponents, (sharon4council.blogspot.com) has the quintessential weird blogspot setup: lots of strangely styled posts, mysterious legal briefs, and a funky fantasy painting at the very bottom. There's barely a trace of her House campaign.
- Mike Bidwell, Rep. Terry Morrow's (St. Peter) challenger in 23A, (bidwell4house.com) has a basically blank site.
- Rep. Kathy Brynaert's (DFL-Mankato) site for 23B has some kind of line-wrapping problem (hickorytech.net/~mnflipnb), probably because of missing closing HTML tags. This is a great example of where Firebug or the Web Developer toolbar can troubleshoot layout problems (see below).
- Tim Rud, challenging Rep. David Bly (DFL-Northfield) in 25B, (timrud.com) looks like a default template.
The good ones we liked:
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Mark Altenberg, Lanning's DFL challenger, (markaltenburg.com) has a good, clean design which features a Facebook group, a YouTube channel and Flickr photostream. Each of those is easy to set up and provides channels for candidates to reach potential voters with minimal work. It prominently features a YouTube clip of Altenburg's campaign kick-off.
- David Allan Pundt in 12A, Rep. John Ward's (DFL-Brainerd) GOP challenger, (davidallanpundt.com) has an excellent design, with an event calendar and a cool Flash-based Polaroid slideshow featuring parades, meeting with U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), the family, etc. He also has a blogspot account that has been updated regularly during July.
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Rep. Bly is well-known for his long-running blogging efforts (davidbly.com), as was his predecessor and frequent electoral opponent, Ray Cox (raycox.net). The two were the first to have a bona fide who-can-out-blog-whom contest.
Some suggestions from PIM staff:
Without the right tools, Web development is a hit-or-miss, trial-and-error affair. Make a tweak, save, upload, see if it worked. Then, of course, it might render differently in different browsers.
Here are our free must-have tools for successful Web tweaks: Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 is now out, and it's quick and reliable. There are many add on extensions for developers, but two of them are crucial. The Web Developer toolbar creates twelve drop-down menus that control all aspects of Web display. Our favorite feature draws boxes to show the otherwise invisible layout elements on the page, eliminating a colossal amount of guesswork. It also can validate the code, analyze forms, cookies, images, and help manage a myriad of other small items that are a pain to determine manually.
Firebug creates a panel that lets you, the harried part-time developer, make live tweaks to the style sheets and HTML, so you can see right away what each change does. (The changes are only made within Firefox's representation of the site, not the real site itself, so your experiments won't affect what the public sees.) It also helps debug JavaScript problems, tells you if individual files are loading slowly and shows syntax errors in code.
To see how various browsers and operating systems display your site differently (always a bane), this article at Smashing Magazine has many tips. The free IE NetRenderer shows several versions of Internet Explorer at once. BrowserShots.org shows a ton of different browsers, but you have to wait for a few minutes unless you pay a few bucks. Litmus is an advanced tool that also shows how different email clients present emails. BrowserCam.com is a fancy pay service with some extra features, much like BrowserPool. We're most impressed with the ease of the free BrowserShots.
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