September 10th, Municipal Government and County Council elections

Let’s take a look at the elections with the eyes of the web-developer.

We’ll take a look at following parties: RV, SV, DNA, SP, KrF, V, H, Frp

I choose to focus on 4 areas, each of those will get a score -2(awfull), -1(bad), 0(neutral), 1(good), 2(excellent). The areas are:

1. Visual design
2. W3C conformation and source code
3. Ease of finding the “electoral promise”
4. Ease of finding of party’s vision and long term plan

Let’s start.
RV
1. -1: Boring visual
2. 0: No doc type, but they “play” HTML :-), just look at this
The guys have sense of humor though

who disagrees :-)?
3. 0: Located in section “Useful”, one click away from the front page leading to a pdf document :-(
4. 1: Second link from top to the right, one click away from the front page, not bad at all.

RV Total: 0;

SV
1. 1: Actually not that bad, could give them 2 if it were not those red boxes at the end of the page and sesam search field at the top :-)
2. 0: they are on the way to writing better code, if they check it for missing closing tags, remove some inline css, etc
3. 2: In the middle of the front page, you hardly find better place
4. 2: In the middle of the front page, you hardly find better place

Total SV: 5.

DNA
1. 2: Very good visual
2. 0: Suffers from divitis, missing closing tags, but is on the way to good code
3. 0: Top banner is actually the thing, but I thought it was a top banner :-)
4. 0: Two clicks away from the front page, starting with first link in the left menu.

Total DNA: 2

SP
1. 1: Three pictures of Aslaug Haga on the front page is too much of a good thing :-)
2. -1: it looked to be 0 for inline css, nonlimited use of br tags, etc, but then I spotted font tags and tables :-( grrr and it functions bad in firefox
3. 1: One click from the front page, though the link is not very descriptive
4. 0: There are two-three links that talks about the same and could be counted as “the thing”, why not say that in plain text and have only one?

Total SP: 1

KrF
1. 0: white text on white stripes does not work very well
2. -2: Tables, deprecated tags… Looks like web-designers at KrF just stumbled upon FrontPage :-) Wake up, it’s 2007 out there.
3. -2: Didn’t find one. At all… Seriously…
4. 1: One click away from the front page

I’ve seen this too much during my surfing

P.S. And it’s god damn sloooow.
P.P.S. Have you seen your fonts in FireFox? Neither did I, had no microscope.

Venstre
1. 0: You have to do something about fonts.
2. 1: Wow. It actually validates!!! MediaFront has sold their ability to make flash where the client needed web-design. Let’s see what google sees on front page:

I think Venstre will have problems getting new votes: they are not even on the first page for search “venstre politisk parti” on google. But the main site is good.
3. 0: you are actually coming to the election version of website, and have to click to come to the normal one
4. 0: three to ten clicks away, depending on how fast you realize that there are two versions of the website :-)

Total V: 1

Høyre
1. 1: Pretty good visually, would have been 2, if they had removed the banner on the right side.
2. 2: Hey, this one validates too :-) P.S. one typo: atl instead of alt, but we forget this.
3. 1: One click away, though the link name could be more descriptive
4. 2: Right on spot. Two clicks away and the choices you make are very logical.

Total Høyre: 6

FrP
1. 1: Nice visual, fonts chosen did not allow to give 2.
2. 0: well, there are other tags then div’s, you know.
3. -1: When clicking on link with the right name to see their “election promise” I was greeted with “access denied” (ingen tilgang) :-) he he, do they have something to hide? Though I could download a pdf version
4. 1: This one worked as intended, two clicks away from the front page.

Total Frp: 1.

Well, the web-developer votes Høyre this year.