There’s a Canadian federal election coming in early May. One would think that if a party wants to run the country then surely it can run a web site:
• The Liberals have the slowest loading site of the bunch. Almost painful, but let’s be charitable and assume the site was just busy today. This site uses free WordPress blog software but it fails XHTML validation. The design is consistent and it uses the party’s traditional red–white colour scheme.
The two-year-old portrait of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is outdated. What does it suggest when the party couldn’t be bothered to get a new business portrait for something as important as a federal election? But again, to be charitable, let’s say the Liberals used an old picture just to save a few bucks.
The site has photo captions and credits on many of its pictures. The party has hired at least one experienced news photographer, but the site suffers from either non-existent or just plain bad photo editing.
• The Conservative site uses the same CMS software as the British Columbia provincial Liberals but uses different styling options. Obviously, the Conservatives have money to spend – no free WordPress software for them. The site fails basic HTML 4 validation.
This site has discarded the Conservative’s traditional blue and white colours in favour of a new red-white-and-blue colour theme.
There’s no business portrait of party leader Stephen Harper. The sites has small pictures, no photo captions and no photo credits. It appears to be a mix of professional and amateur pictures. No apparent photo editing.
• The NDP site uses the party’s traditional Halloween colours of orange and black, a fact not overlooked by the web designer who literally includes “tricks” and “treats” in the page code.
It has an impressive splash screen photo but web surveys have always shown that viewers hate useless splash screens like this. It’s not a WordPress blog but it just happens to look exactly like one. The site fails XHTML validation.
The official portrait of party leader Jack Layton has excellent photography but the picture is at least four years old and very out-of-date.
The site impressively uses big pictures but it’s a wasted effort due to the lack of editing. There are minimal generic captions and no photo credits.
• The Bloc Quebecois site includes a bad use of pop-ups, including pop-ups from pop-ups. Page design changes through the site. It uses free WordPress for its blog. A very busy home page with no useful information on it. It fails XHTML validation.
There’s no official portrait of party leader Gilles Duceppe but the site uses a four-year-old news(?) picture to accompany the leader’s bio information.
The site uses medium-sized pictures, some captions and some photo credits. Seemingly, there’s no picture editing.
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All sites make use of Flash for photo galleries eventhough they already load jQuery which is a faster, easier and lighter way to display images. None of the sites seem to have edited any of their photographs. Picture quality is very “uneven”, to put it politely.
When it comes to photography, these sites have no consistency, no theme, no message, no nothing except photo galleries for the sake of having photo galleries.
None of the federal parties seem to understand proper use of photography. Good business photography or marketing photography doesn’t just happen on its own.
Corporate photography and public relations photography are never about picture quantity. Instead, it’s always about message. The photography must enhance the (business) message. Meaningless pictures thrown into a slideshow just creates noise. Although, maybe that’s what these political parties are trying to do?
