Who should I vote for based only on the the website design and source? I also checked out the Māori party, ACT, Green party New Zealand and New Zealand First.
UTF-8?
All parties had UTF-8 formatted documents, with the correct corresponding content type meta tag, except NZ First and the Māori party. These parties had ISO-8859-1 encoded websites. This has caused problems for the Māori party: Maori Party Home Page.
Static html pages can often be encoded in UTF-8 using a text editing tool. If this is not available then you could try Notepad++ on Windows, Gedit for Gnome Linux/BSD or Kate for KDE Linux/BSD. Text documents on Windows are often ISO-8859-1 or Latin-1 or cp1252. If you expect your files to only contain basic Latin characters, then this may not be an issue. If you want to display characters outside this range, you should consider using UTF-8 format character encoding. This will allow characters outside the normal english range can be displayed.
The Māori party use the Joomla CMS, which can easily be configured to UTF-8; but don’t forget to manage your database content as well!
XHTML?
National provides no doctype, so the doctype is defaulting to html quirks mode… which I thought might be why the page doesn’t display well in Firefox, but it looks the same in IE6…
Greens, ACT and Māori are XHTML 1.0 Strict… Labour is XHTML 1.0 transitional… NZ First are HTML 4.0 transitional.
If you are concerned about the appearance of your website on different platforms, then you should implement a Strict doctype DTD. This will assist the web browser in rendering your website the way you imagined it.
Unfortunately many older browsers have difficulty with some XHTML constructs, because competition and lack of standards until relatively recently. However, if you want your content to render quickly on newer web browsers and withstand the test of time; then you should go with XHTML.
An easy way of doing this is to go with an existing CMS, like the Māori party and the Labour party. It also looks like National is using some sort of home grown CMS.
National party website mistakes
Instead of unobtrusive JavaScript, the National party website implements obtrusive javascript… most of the navigation relies on JavaScript heavy hrefs. If you want JavaScript in your page, you should load it at the end of the document and then look up the elements you want to provide extra functionality to using the JavaScript DOM model.
They are using Google analytics, which is cool and they are following the recommendations on the Google website that this should be imported at the end of the document (hint hint). But they are using the old version of the import.
Meta information like keywords and description are used, but they got them the wrong way around… the content attribute is supposed to contain the description of the content… not the name of the meta element! If you open the page using Firefox, you can view a lot of this header information in the “Page Info” dialog: Tools-> Page Info.
The website is heavily table centric… there are hardly any div elements. A few tables are ok, but the web browser must actually download most of the table structure before it can render it correctly. One of the strengths of div elements is that the browser is supposed to understand the content before the entire page is downloaded… improving the reader experience a little.
I was pretty amazed that the National website was so poor… it uses vadmin CMS engine. But if you check out the vadmin site, it doesn’t seem to have any of the issues the National party site has… its UTF8, XHTML transitional, latest Google analytics (yeah, big deal… but shows they care). The only JavaScript they use is Google analytics and they got the meta content and names correct! The only slight grudge is they still use a lot of html tables… but they don’t load much content into them. Congratulations… perhaps National should get the latest software? Help out a Kiwi company a little.
National party website cool stuff
Join John Keys on Facebook and check out their YouTube videos! I think getting out there is important, for any websites strategic plan. Facebook and YouTube are great ways to boost awareness and gain consumer buy in.
John Key’s website
John’s webslog is encoded in UTF-8; but his smart helpers forgot to change the content-type meta to match… UTF-8 is not the same as ISO-8859-1.
John uses Serendipity, a popular German open source PHP based Weblog system. And he is all about connecting here.. they are using Flickr, YouTube, Faceboo, Technorati and of course, they are getting their RSS feed out there. Well done.
Labour party website mistakes
Labour’s website doesn’t seem to get individual websites out there. And they use multiple title elements in child pages.
Labour get the meta element attributes right, but seem to have chosen not to supply content; why not remove these from the page?
Labour are also loading JavaScript at the top of the page; though this is probably out of the box functionality in the CMS they are using. Labour are also using Google analytics, but the more recent version.
Conclusion
Personally it seems straight forward to me. Nationals website sucks on the inside; Labour is comparatively pretty clean. National have really given it a good shot with personal member blogs and mulitmedia streams… but it just doesn’t make up for the numerous source code blunders… I’m all about the source, so sorry Labour is the winner today.
Other NZ party websites look like they might be even better on the inside. Tomorrow I’ll continue my analysis of New Zealand party websites…
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You may have noticed, I didn’t bother continuing this…