JohnEdwards.com Is a Mess
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 17th, 2007 10:19 amUpon close inspection it turns out that the Edwards’ campaign is maintaining a presence on an astounding 24 social news/networking sites. Wow.
Below is a list from Edwards’ site with links to all his accounts:
43Things, del.icio.us, essembly, facebook, flickr, gather, myspace, partybuilder, youtube, orkut, ning, metacafe, revver, yahoo! 360°, blip.tv, CHBN, vSocial, tagworld, collectivex, bebo, care2, hi5, xanga, livejournal
I get it. The Edwards campaign is really into the whole Web 2.0 thing. Message delivered. I understand the power of these networks. I do. But 24 accounts? This just strikes me as sort of ridiculous.
More importantly, I just don’t think it is good strategy.
I agree.
Like the rest of the site, the Edwards’ campaign latest foray into social networking is just a mess. Just take a look at this page. You’ve got 24 graphics that look almost exactly the same running down a page. After Marcotte/McEwan, the inclusion of Metacafe as a targeted site is just puzzling. See this bit from Wikipedia:
Metacafe has an anti-porn policy. However, it does allow rated-R content as defined by the Motion picture rating system. It has a family filter which is set to “on” by default.
Despite the family filter, many Metacafe users tend to add offensive comments to many videos. Sexual, racist or just plainly offensive comments tend not to be filtered out unless they receive a -3 rating by other users. These comments, however, do not appear if the Family Filter is turned on.
And what’s more, everywhere I go, all I see is:
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
The number one mistake a web person can make is to craft pages as though the average person will read every word of it. That’s the critical mistake the Edwards people make on their homepage — wasting valuable real estate on paragraphs of copy I must have seen a dozen times but haven’t gotten around to reading yet. A homepage should be made for scanning, so a big graphic with your message of the day, with icons and 5-6 word descriptions of your key features is what works best. And for those like David, who say less text hurts SEO, that’s what ALT tags are for.
Not everything about JohnEdwards.com is terrible. Their splash page is very nicely done and the blog is one of the more innovative ones I’ve seen. (What’s more is that it’s sticky — Alexa suggests 37% of traffic is coming to the blog.) Both features pre-date their Presidential iterations, when they were matched with a smartly done (if still a bit busy) main PAC site.
Since this ties into the poll on your favorite Dem website I’ve been running on the side for a while, I thought I’d break down the results.
Prior to Hillary announcing on January 20th, Edwards was the clear winner: 48% to Obama’s 24% and Hillary’s 12%.
When both Hillary and Edwards were up with their full sites, Hillary moved into second: Breck 32%, Hillary 28%, Obama 20%.
But now that Obama is up, he blows them all away: Obama 49%, Edwards 21%, Hillary 17%. That seems about right.
Tagged: 2008 
john edwards online politics
Comments (1) 
Trackbacks (4) 
del.icio.us 
digg it 
subscribe
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
[…] Joshua Levy reminded me about something which I wanted to address: Patrick Ruffini calls John Edwards’ site a “mess,” in part because, as Todd Ziegler notes, there are icons for and links to 24 social news/social networking sites. “I get it. The Edwards campaign is really into the whole Web 2.0 thing. Message delivered. I understand the power of these networks. I do. But 24 accounts? This just strikes me as sort of ridiculous,” Ziegler says. […]
[…] Yikes. That is a lot. It’s yet to be seen how effective that sort of effort will have. Check out the list. […]
[…] Did someone on the Edwards campaign staff read my post criticizing their Web site? […]
[…] JohnEdwards.com Is a Mess by Patrick Ruffini […]