Fianna Fáil pulled a bit of a bait and switch on the launch of their new website. Lured by the promise of a talk by Joe Rospars the new media director of the Obama campaign, a bunch of Irish bloggers and internet types were disappointed to find out that the talk was only to last 10 minutes and the real reason they were there was to witness the unveiling of the FF party website.
It’s hardly surprising they pulled a move like that, they would hardly have gotten any attendance otherwise. They are after all politicians, what else would people expect?
All that aside, I checked out the new site and here are some thoughts.
SEO
The designers seem to have missed a cruicial factor in redesigning any website. They squandered any search engine ranking that the site may have had by not redirecting the old addresses to the new ones. Clearly they based the new site on a new content management system which means a complete change in the structure of the sites addresses. The widely published solution to this problem is to use 301 redirects. You simply inventory all your pages and redirect the old URL to the new equivalent.
So for example, if you google the TD Martin Mansergh, the first result is the FF website, but when you follow the link you get a 404 Page not Found.
Which leads me to my next gripe
No Search function?
Really, in this day and age? The absence of a search function is just downright laziness. Google offer an excellent free search service that you can embed in your own site and for a small fee you can remove the advertising.
So at this point, I’ve found my way to the site via a URL that no longer exists and I have no way to continue to find what I’m looking for. Poor show.
Edit your copy
Assuming you have persevered long enough to find what you’re looking for you will no doubt be frustrated by the unreadable content. Check out the screenshot below that shows a typical page of content.
There are no paragraphs, no sub-heads, and barely any punctuation. 5 minutes is all it would have taken to make this content readable but it seems it wasn’t worth the effort.
Image Maps?
I don’t think I’ve seen an HTML image map used since about 2001 but their web designers have resurrected it for reasons unknown. The clickable map works, but only just. Flash would have offered a far better user experience, and the issue of support for flash is long gone.
Overall this site looks pretty good, and FF are to be commended for their adoption of social networking tools like twitter, and facebook. But when you scratch below the surface it’s a pretty poor show.
Tags: politics, web design
Posted February 27, 2009 by admin under Web development
