Taking My Own Advice: New Political Campaign Website Design
Last week on Killer Campaigning, I published two posts that had to do with how election candidates can create effective local political campaign websites. The first was an endorsement of the website platform WordPress for building and publishing political campaign sites, and the second offered advice about going with a minimal, simple candidate website design in order to capitalize on web surfing trends.
Although I already had my own official political campaign website that used WordPress (I’m an elected city councilman in Amherst, Ohio), writing those two posts made me reconsider my design and its effectiveness. I spent yesterday redesigning my campaign website, and hope you’ll look at the re-launch of PhilVanTreuren.com to see how I took my own advice in its new layout.
The new homepage is now much more focused on social media, with the Facebook Fan Box and YouTube video section taking up much more prominent and visible positions. While visitors can find out more detailed information about me on internal pages, I limited homepage media to scrolling photos and a few short paragraphs that feature a focused campaign message.
The one bit of advice that I didn’t apply to my own new political campaign redesign was the inclusion of a prominent donation option on the homepage. Although I’ll probably integrate donation options during campaign season next year, I thought that visitors would appreciate an embedded Google map of the City of Amherst, Ohio more (if I were an elected official who held a higher office, I might include a permanent donation button, but city council candidates don’t usually attract year-around contibutions).
That issue of integrating a donation option on WordPress sites does bring up another consideration that I’ll focus more attention on later: whether or not there are any good WordPress plugins that allow election candidates to accept political campaign contributions online. Most of the donation plugins that I have seen use PayPal, which allows contributors to donate money using their credit cards, but I’m not yet clear on the election legalities of using PayPal for political donations.
Anyway, more on WordPress political campaign donation plugins in another post.
The final major change that I made to PhilVanTreuren.com was the addition of an integrated blog, which will let me post occasional new information, updates, announcements and other stuff that might be of interest to constituents. Although I don’t plan on posting to my political campaign blog as often as I do here, it will also be a good vehicle for keeping fresh info on my Facebook Fan Page (I can set up my Facebook page to automatically post anything that I publish on my political campaign blog).
So there you have it: I’m eating my own dog food, so to speak, and re-designed PhilVanTreuren.com using the same advice that I gave readers of Killer Campaigning. While I’m sure the general layout will change some in coming months, I’m pretty satisfied with the new design.
What do you think? Do you like the new design, or are there changes you would make? Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts.
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John on February 23rd, 2010
Looks great. What theme are you using?