Red Vs Web 2.0
This is kind of a tangent to my current exploration of political party websites, namely my Red Vs Blue comparison of how both Labour and The Conservatives use their main web space to engage the general public.
This post delves a little deeper into the Labour marketing strategy, especially their current upscale in social media and what could loosely be called ‘web 2.0′ style sites. This kind of political marketing is really ramping up after successful implementation of similar strategies by Obama in the US, it seems our politicians and strategists are realising it is a highly underused medium for political engagement over here.
I had already noticed that Labour’s main website had a subtle but clear web 2.0 design style and a layout reminiscent of a blog. A sign perhaps of the things that were to come.
On their main website Labour have their ongoing Shadow cabinet web chat spoof animation and viral (which I talk about here) and a rather impressively stocked ‘Tools for your website‘ page, which has all kinds of nicely designed animations and interactive little widgets for people to post on their site or blog to support Labour.
More recently Tangent One have been helping them with guidelines on the best ways to use social media to interact with the public to help with their new campaign using facebook, twitter and email to deliver communications. About a dozen MPs currently Twitter and they plan to increase this and other social media activity over the next few months.
Labourlist.org was published in January 09 as a portal ‘Where Labour minded people come together’ according to their strap line. Also published that month was Labour space a site encouraging the public to vote on reforms and submit their own campaign ideas using the strap line ‘Be the change’.
Labour list (http://www.labourlist.org)
My first observation on Labour List (before even getting to the content) is that strangely, although both these site are obviously run by the Labour Party themselves, they bear little relation to the main site and brand.
Labour List has it’s own quite old fashioned 1990’s style logo and styling which, apart from including the colour red, have nothing to do with Labour’s clean fresh new look and feel at all.
A list of sites includes the Labour party main site (but none of the other sites they have just launched) somewhere far down on the right hand menu and the logo is hidden right down in the footer. It seems very counterproductive to design a site not to match or even compliment their brand. Had I not known otherwise I would have had no idea at a quick glance that this was an official Labour site.
Even their about us page states:
“Welcome to LabourList, the must read online forum for Labour minded people to come together to share news and views and, hopefully, also have a laugh.”
Are they trying to make out that this isn’t an official Labour site? I really don’t think anyone with the intelligence to seek out such a site is going to be fooled. In fact – I think it would have a much stronger impact to be obviously made by the government – to show they are wanting to engage the public in this manner.
A massive opportunity to not only use brand awareness and gain visitors trust using the design of the site was missed here with this somewhat foolhardy separatist strategy on the look and feel. Not to mention the fact that the look of this site is immensely dull and tired looking compared to the Labour main site. The branding of which would have transferred beautifully to this usage. I see the desire to brand the Labour List as it’s own entity to some degree (i.e it’s own logo alongside the Labour one), but really guys, it could have been so much better than this.
That is not to say the site itself is all that bad. The navigation should be tighter down the sides of the pages. This would bring the minimum height of the pages down and allow users to access a wider range of content without quite so much risk of repetitive strain from scrolling. The homepage needed attention as well. It kind of just throws a lot of content at you without grounding what the site is and where you are, specifically since they aren’t using the Labour brand they can’t really get away with this. BBC news can, as everyone knows where they are and what they are looking at, but this site has a range of content and messages under an unknown and unfamiliar logo. They could have utilised the front page space better by employing a nice compartmentalized grid based design which welcomed the visitor and led them directly into their area of interest with recent posts and so on populating the side navigation rather than so many links.
Other gripes are the underused content such as videos, which seem only promoted far down on the left sub-navigation area. And the contributors panel is clearly far too long down the left, which looks especially unwieldy on pages with minimal content.
But the site is usable, it works and seems to already have a healthy amount of contributors posting relevant articles. It just seems like such a good idea deserved a lot more time spent on brand positioning and design. This could have been beautiful guys…
Labour – Go Forth (www.gofourth.co.uk)
Moving on – via another tangent. I spotted, far down on the endless right hand side navigation on Labour List, a link to a Labour site I didn’t know. Go Forth.
This is ANOTHER Labour site. This one said on the about page:
Go Fourth was founded by John Prescott, Glenys Kinnock, Richard Caborn and Alastair Campbell in September 2008 to create a broad grassroots movement to secure a progressive Fourth Labour Term.
What? A whole site with more news, videos and a blog by john that’s completely unconnected to any of the other completely unconnected websites they have running?
Your a political party – surely you can talk to each other? This content seems like it should be a sub section to one of the other sites to me rather than another separate website. The main Labour website has very little actual content. It seems to be located everywhere but their website. There aren’t even links to any of these website’s from the main one – and it is the main one that pops up sponsored on Google if you look for Labour – not these. One wonders really how connected any of their marketing strategies are – if they cant either use their websites more effectively by putting this content (or at least links to it) on their main one, or stop using their SEO and money on the main one and just concentrate on one of these. There is some good content on here, videos, blogs, news etc, all hidden away where you can’t find it unless you already know it is there. And again, this has another logo and branding look and feel design. I quite like the logo at least – but there seems no reason not to put this content as a subsection of one of the other sites or at least put links to it from them and use the Labour branding on this site.
Labour Space (www.labourspace.com)
Onto the next one… Also launched in January 09 was the aforementioned Labour space website.
This site has another logo and branding design but is a little more up to date in it’s look and feel. It is far more sympathetic and harmonious with the main Labour brand than the other sites I have stumbled across so far. It uses bold bands of red with icons and just feels more designed than the other sites. I would personally have carried across the hugely iconic and lovely decorative usage of the Labour rose and perhaps a few other design elements for a more consistent experience, but this really is the nicest looking one so far, and it isn’t even that impressive.
Then I tried to do something, anything, on the site. I could click the main animation (after 5 attempts) to see a article relating to it’s message. Probably something wrong with the flash streaming, could be me, or so I thought. Then I scrolled down and tried to click on the ‘Featured campaigns’ and ‘Ed says’, the graphs of results seemed to intermittently show up on hover as clickable (hand pointer) but wouldn’t click, some areas such as ‘Start your campaign’ worked but loaded awfully slowly and then just took me to a rather unattractive registration screen. The movie player didn’t work.
First month jitters maybe? I hope so. I can’t really review the site per-se as not enough of it was working. It is a good idea though and the few pages I could view didn’t look bad, even if they didn’t wow me as they could have. This site really has potential to get people involved with campaigns and voting on issues, although again my brain won’t cease pointing out that all this great content could be a subdomain or page (with its own domain redirection from something catchy like labourspace.com) rather than an entire different unconnected website.
The more I see these secondary sites, the more I feel the main Labour site is failing as they just aren’t putting any of their interesting content there. For example – people campaigning and engaging with Labour on these sites are the exact people who would utalise the many website widgets and tools hidden away on the main website…
They are really not leveraging (good manager speak that) the potential of their content and user bases. I think their overall strategy really needs to be rethought to bring the different aspects of the campaigns into line probably under the umbrella of just one or two sites so visitors can get to all these features and have one log in to be part of one large united community. Really I think they could take a risk and have just one amazing destination site for the public, supporter or otherwise, with different sub sections where visitors could get to a wealth of content and media. This would also far better present a strong consistent voice from the party. Right now they have some good ideas scattered across various sites and wasting a lot of potential.
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This post is part of a series – read all the Red Vs Blue articles here
