Mitt Romney’s campaign web site is up and running. It probably has been for a while, but I only recently noticed it. Here’s a few of my thoughts on the site.

Before I start with my usual review, I thought I’d mention the Five Brothers Blog. Mr. Romney has his sons blogging for him on a subdomain of his political site. A nice touch I thought. It’s dynamic nature should help drive traffic. Five people writing about Mitt Romney should definitely get good placement in the search engines. It seems to be well written too. They’re all following the campaign’s direction I suppose, but they all sound sincere. I think this aspect of the site will turn out to be big benefit as the campaign goes on.

Style
A fairly simple color palette, red, white, blue with a couple grays. Simple, but well done. The palette gives it a very clean and neat look, and the layout takes advantage of that.

The home page plays a sequence of campaign photos with links to press releases. They had the decency to run the photos fairly slowly, which is nice. A lot of sites seem to try to rush images by you at a rapid rate, but this isn’t unpleasant. It’s also, with one exception, the only moving part of the site, which is nice too. Too many sites find a technology like this scrolling images, and use it repeatedly. One moving image is interesting, two is annoying, and three will get you convicted of cruel and unusual punishment by any jury. The one exception I mentioned is a flash piece the plays when you hit the site for the first time. It’s a clever little bit of flash that shows Mr. Romney appear to walk out into your browser and welcome you to the site. My screen capture above shows him in the lower right corner. While it is clever, and is well done, I’m still undecided on whether it’s a benefit to the site or not. I’d think it would be found annoying by most people, but I could be wrong. It didn’t annoy me, but I’m a geek, and I’m fascinated by this sort of technological geekery.

The layout is mostly a three column affair. Nice and neat, everything in it’s place. They’ve so far stayed away from the clutter that can infest this sort of site. Hopefully they’ll continue that trend.

White space is used well. A fairly tight layout, but not too much so. Everything flows nicely, with no crowding.

It’s a fixed width page, which is a negative for me. I almost always think a fluid layout would be better. That said, this layout does work well. I wouldn’t hold it against the designer too much that this is fixed width. It probably wasn’t their choice anyway.

Structure
The site structure is decent. Almost entirely CSS with a table thrown in a couple of times. All tables appear to be used appropriately for tabular data of one kind or another.

While the site does view well in a variety of browsers, it could use some help. It has an unusually high number of validation errors and warnings. They appear to be mostly from the use of outdated or inappropriate coding. No individual problem is severe, but I’d be concerned that out of date browsers might have problems here. More than anything it looks like the Doctype doesn’t match the coding. Someone has upgraded the Doctype to something newer than the code can support. Again, not a big thing, but it should be fixed.

There are also some accessibility issues. A lot of images don’t have alt coding for instance. While this might be insignificant on a blog like mine, a campaign site needs to be really active on this. If you don’t give your viewers the information they came for, they’ll get it at another candidate’s site.

Content
The kind of political jabbering you’d expect from a campaign site. Nothing you wouldn’t expect with the possible exception of what could turn into a decent blog.

What would I change
I’d really only change the structure. Get the Doctype matching the code, and clean up the accessibility issues. Leave the style alone, and execute the style a little better with some cleaner code.

Summary
I’m a little surprised actually. It’s better than I thought it would be. Candidates seem to be taking the web much more seriously this campaign cycle, which is a good thing. A lot of people are using the web to do political research, and not taking it seriously can really hamstring a campaign. I think Mr. Romney will be well served by this site if it’s maintained properly.

Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, Right Celebrity, DeMediacratic Nation, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, The Amboy Times, Leaning Straight Up, Conservative Cat, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.