5. Website
The campaign website will encourage people to get to know the candidate better and become involved with the campaign. The website will include sections on Issues, Donating, Volunteering, Recent Press Releases, Biography, Recent News, and Videos. The front screen of the website will encourage people to sign up to get involved with the campaign with an option for them to skip that page if they prefer to go to the main part.
Its relevance relies on the fact that voters would actually judge a candidate by his or her website.
Example of a Good Website
Barack Obama 2008 Campaign
Example of a Bad websites
George Hutchins
http://www.georgehutchins.com/
Site Features
The domain is the name of the web site. To reserve a particular domain you must reserve one (it costs approximately 35USD). It is highly recommended that it should be short and easy to spell. The site should make voters able to guess the fact that this page belongs to you, for this reason it should avoid initials, numbers or words in a confusing way.
Keep your website name short. Make it distinct, short, and easy to spell. It is recommended to use 12 or less characters.
Easy to spell.
Avoid using initials. Use the version of the name that is simplest and most easy to remember.
Make it clear. Avoid using numbers in a confusing way or odd words. It is important that when people look at your website they should be able to guess that it belongs to you and not to someone else.
Chose ".com" and not ".org" or ".net". The rational behind this is that most browsers automatically go to the ".com" address unless another suffix is specified.
The page should download quickly at ordinary modem speeds. It is recommended that the home page should be fast to download. This is important since slow pages discourage site visitors from staying to read the text on your site. Additionally it sends your visitors the message that you and your web team do not understand the importance of speed on the internet.
During the USA campaigns in 2000 the download performance of many campaign sites was bad according to CNN and other mainstream media.
In some countries it is allowed for citizens to make contributions to the campaign. In this case the website could be a great medium. For this reason, it is important that in your website potential donors can use credit cards and checkbooks to make campaign contributions.
4. Volunteer sign-up form
The home page should have a link to an online form that collects the names and contact information of volunteers.
5. Short form to collect email addresses
Each page on your site should have a simple form requesting the vital information for your database, such as name, zip code, and email address.
Some pages have it under the navigation buttons on the left side of the page and others at the top of the page.
It is important because the people that sign up could be potential volunteers or donors. Moreover, it is important to maintain the contact with those who manifested interest in your campaign. You can keep in touch by sending newsletters, thank you notes, or updates and try to make them go back to your site.
When large number of visitors send messages to their friends, family and colleagues suggesting your website it increase your credibility. In order to encourage this grassroots support you should provide a feature that allows visitors to easily and quickly send emails to friends from your site.
