Irish political websites: a lot dumb, more to do?

— Published April 16th, 2007  |  by David Moore

The last time we reviewed Irish political sites in May 2004, their mediocre quality made us want to abstain from the upcoming election.

Now, with another election in the offing, we look to see whether our straightforward advice (no frames, no splash screens, RSS feeds, good depth of content) has been heeded, and examine how well more recent developments in online campaigning elsewhere had been adopted here.

Meet the new site, same as the old site

Some sites haven’t changed much at all in three years.

The Sinn Fein site is basically the same, just with a link to their MySpace and Bebo pages (which smacks of being seen to keep up with the times, rather than actually doing it).

This is a surprise given their normally media-savvy approach, but even more surprising is that (at the time of writing – April 2nd) there’s scant reference to the upcoming election at all.

The Progressive Democrats’ homepage has a facelift, but the guts of the site follows the same shape as before – complete with the missing sublevel navigation which makes it very easy to get lost.

Some improvements, some backsliding

The Green Party’s site is much better than it was, and Labour have built on the relatively solid base from last time with a nice feature that links news to particular constituencies.

Fianna Fail offer something similar, where information on a candidate is combined with the latest stories from that area – a simple idea but very useful in tracking down what’s happening in your area.

Fine Gael’s site is different, but might actually be worse than before. The homepage is a mess, and the use of the top horizontal bar for the disclaimer and privacy policy is bonkers.

Furthermore, Mac users would probably abstain as the website won't play nice for them and their URL, finegaeltemp.biznetservers.com further reflects the fact that the website went up in too much of a hurry.

Spin-off sites

So who did this first, I wonder? The Labour party have a standalone campaign site: www.makeachange.ie, and it’s matched in brevity and Powerpoint feel by FF’s www.thenextsteps.ie.

The PD’s go for attack rather than solutions in their spin-off site, www.rainbowsplits.ie (which sounds more like an ice-cream, but anyway...).

The thinking seems to be that few people will work their way through the full sites, so a pithy separate site is the answer.

Work in progress

Or it may be that these sites are a distraction from the large holes in the main sites. Most parties have built individual subsites for their candidates, or they link to a separate site entirely.

This is fine, but there’s often very little content there. From Joe Costello’s empty blog to Mary Harney’s empty site it seems that only a few candidates are actually blogging for real.

Image is everything

How the parties display photographs shows a little of how well they've grasped the contemporary web scene. Labour do well by hosting all their photos on Flickr (complete with good tagging and Creative Commons licensing info) and embedding them into their site. Sinn Fein also use Flickr, but don’t go the extra mile of sprinkling their photos through their own site.

Fine Gael have a lot of photos online too, but they are only navigable by name (not thumbnail), and are only available in one small size.

Fianna Fail carefully manage their photo use in a more calculating style. The picture of Bertie with a cross-section of Ireland’s Youth is cheesy, but much less cloying than the healthcare professional with sweet old lady shot.

Moving pictures

Mary Harney’s site might not be ready yet, but she employed a professional production company to shoot her first video podcast (which sort of defeats the purpose of a podcast as an informal, more personal perspective on a candidate).

Aside from her bad hair day, it looks and sounds like a party election broadcast, and if you live by YouTube, you must be prepared to die by YouTube – it wasn’t long before a parody of her performance appeared.

Two-way communication

One of lessons from Howard Dean’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination in the US was that you can use your site to build a grassroots campaign – getting people involved, and making them feel they can make a difference.

Most of the Irish sites have a form that allows people to join the party, but where are the opportunities to submit questions, photographs, comments, news . . . ?

There’s still very much a top-down feel to the information flow from all the sites, rather than building a framework that allows two-way communication.

Can we abstain again?

None of the site are entirely convincing. Some are just plain bad – Fine Gael and the PDs, we mean you. Some are slick but a little soulless (FF), while some are OK, but don’t really excite (Labour and the Greens).

All the parties’ use of audio, video and blogging features feels rushed and not fully understood. Maybe this time round it’s just enough to show willing, but compared to the well-integrated blogging, fundraising and community-building activity on Barack Obama’s site in the US or UK Conservative leader David Cameron’s online home, there’s definitely a long way to go here.

Related articles from iQ Content

• UK political sites: are you thinking what we're thinking? (April 2005)
• Political sites - Who gets our first preference? (May 2004)