Having an official campaign website is pretty much a political prerequisite these days. If you're a serious candidate you get one made and ready to launch the DAY you announce your candidacy. (For your convenience, we've linked to each candidate's site at right.)
Except for webbie-challenged Former Harris-County District Judge Jim Squier and Texas Rep. Robert Talton -- both MIA on the web. Talton has a site "under construction." Squier -- zippo.
Of course, the quality of the sites also matters. Hrbacek, Manlove, Sekula Gibbs and Olson all have professional, serious sites. Doogie, er, Alan Steinberg has an amatuerish blog -- which fits with his "hey I'm young and ambitious so vote for me" pitch. Ryan Rowley (from Clear Lake) has a BORING blog but at least he's populated it with some meaty (albeit still boring) content.
Shelley's site has an extremely annoying video that launches automatically on the home page. She has a lot of great content -- probably too much. One of the raps on Gibbs is her knack for taking 30 minutes to deliver a 5 minute message. Her website is more of the same.
Hrbacek has a ho-hum site with all the essential elements (bio, place to donate, place to volunteer, etc.). It lacks life and is short on specifics. He needs to add some position statements, more pictures of him and/or his volunteers in action and tell folks more about what he stands for.
The home page of former Pasadena Mayor John Manlove's site is, well, a little scary. John, the dems are already having a field day with their seedy (and typically sicko) interpretation of your last name (jokes about ManBoylove abound.) Please tone down that picture of you on your home page that leaps out with an almost leering quality. Otherwise, your site passes the "I'm a real candidate" muster just fine.
Olson, the ultimate Washington insider, has one of the slickest sites -- maybe too slick for this district. He plays heavily on this military service and ties to his former boss Phil Gramm. Interestingly, there isn't one picture on his site of him with Sen. John Cornyn for whom he worked for nearly 5 years as his Chief of Staff.
In our humble opinion, NONE of the candidates are really using their websites to full advantage.
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5 comments:
You see "amatuerish blog" ... I see reaching out to the public for free. Why pay a lot for something you can get for free (or cheep)? Perhaps if more elected officials looked for ways to do things more cost efficiently our national debt would not be so high.
Like we said -- it fits the tone of your campaign, Doogie.
I am constantly improving my website in form and content. I'm not totally happy with it at this time. This is the 5th version since I put it up in Jan 2007. Normally I would have hand coded the site in HTML and JAVA; however I just don't have the time. I used a canned generator to get it up and to get the info out. My staff needed this tool quickly. As we get closer to the election you will see much more meat and I hope to make it more interesting. I have a separate BLOG area at www.ryanrowley.com that has been created to allow discussion and other internal sites for the use of my staff. We are open to any suggestions and questions that you might have. I will place your BLOG on my list to watch and look forward in reading your content.
Welcome to the party, Ryan.
Added some more meat to my site and blog. If you want I could post it here as well.
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