Democrats vs Republicans: Who is winning online?
Forget those bumper stickers and TV ads. The real midterm election battles are happening online. We evaluated the national websites for both the Republican and Democratic parties. Sites were evaluated in seven key categories spanning website design and marketing best practices. There are lessons to be learned from both sites, regardless of your own political preference.
| Democratic Party Site | Republican Party Site |
|---|---|
www.democrats.org
|
www.gop.com
|
| Design | |
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The Democratic site is easier on the eyes with better colors, more legible text and superior information design and layout. Gaudy sidebar ads take away from an otherwise well designed experience that helps users immediately focus on the content and navigation. Second level pages retain the clean styles and layouts, providing a consistent experience from top to bottom. Grade: A- |
The Republican site is a confusing mashup of competing colors, graphics and promotions that leave visitors bewildered. The blue base color is a surprising choice given the party's strong affiliation with red. The homepage race car banner clutters the experience visually. It appears as if multiple designers are contributing to the site with little attention to an overall styleguide. Grade: D+ |
| Content | |
|
Both sites offer a comparable smattering of content on their platforms, blogs, photos, videos and audio. It's puzzling the Democrats have no visible call to action on how to vote in the days leading up to the election. And for the "all politics is local" crowd, the website falls woefully short of providing relevant local content. Grade: C |
You may not be able to find the content (see Usability), but the Republican site has its counterpart beat when it comes to more relevant, actionable information. A timely feature on the 72-hour push to election day highlights how and where to vote and where volunteers are needed the most in the final days. Grade: B+ |
| Persuasion | |
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The Democrats bring a balanced approach to integrating action activities with site content. Primary calls to action are tucked away in a global navigation item with sidebar callouts. While addressing issues is important,key actions remain too hidden and should be integrated stronger with the content. A tip of the hat goes to them for for the clean e-mail newsletter integration in the header. Grade: B- |
The Republican site is built for lead generation to the point of obstructing important content. A form splash page stands between first time visitors and the home page, while no less than 10 call to action links scream at you from the real home page. However, the Republican site certainly grabs attention (even if through brute force) to direct users straight into ways to get involved. Grade: A- |
| Usability | |
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A friendly design adds considerably to the usability of the Democratic site. Though similar to the Republican site, the lack of a sub navigation system significantly hurts accessing secondary content. The clear navigation design and a usable drop down menu helps out some. The Democrats controversy (code named "Flip Flop") surfaces with the Espanol link. It translates the global navigation, but only half of the site is available in Spanish, making for disjointed experience in which the user is never quite sure where they are. Grade: C |
The Republican site is in rough usability shape with several major gaffes including its horribly crowded and unusable navigation system. Their main scandal (code named "Navigation-gate) occurs after you click on a global navigaion link. The sub navigation is invisible, making it nearly impossible to get to the content on the site. This coupled with the design inconsistencies provide for a challenging and awkward experience. At least with the aggressive action links, visitors can get to some meaningful content and end destinations. Grade: D |
| Reach | |
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According to Yahoo!, the Democratic site has 348,011 sites linking to it and a search engine saturation of 86,735 indexed listings based on a report from Marketleap. Technorati shows the Democratic blog ranked 23,452 with links from 126 other blogs. Both sites could do much better becoming a relevant voice in the blogosphere. Grade: B+ |
Based on the same sources, the Republican site has 199,602 sites linking to it and almost double the indexed pages in search engines at 166,928. On the blog front. The site is ranked 32,500 with 94 blogs linking to it. We're giving a slight nod to the Democrats for reach on the basis of relevant traffic from link partners and blogs. Grade: B- |
| Accessibility | |
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Sadly, both sites fail basic web site accessibility tests. The Dems ring up 22 code compliancy errors based on the W3C validation tool, but the errors are minor when compared to their competition across the aisle. Most of their images have alternative text tags and they offer text alternatives for their radio addresses. We have seen much, much worse. Grade: B |
Using the same W3C test, the Republican site has an abysmal 155 errors leading us to wonder, "Are they even trying?". Looking at the source code, the site is built with table based layouts and misses key accessibility features such as alt tags on images. Most video and audio has accompanying transcripts, but the people deserve better from both sites. Grade: D- |
| Overall | |
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This race may be too close to call, but our non-partisan scoring system gives the Democratic website the edge with a 2.69 grade point average. In the end, usability, accessibility and clean design put it over the top, but there are numerous lessons to be learned by looking across the aisle at their Republican foes. Overall GPA: 2.69 |
The Republican site's GPA came to 2.5, falling just short of the top spot. Even with severe usability issues, there is something to be said for its 'hit you over the head' call to action links encouraging visitor participation. Despite the problems, it's likely the better performing site getting people into action areas. Overall GPA: 2.5 |