Fine Gael’s new website

Fine Gael’s new website is now live. First thing that strikes me is the amount of green on the site and how Fine Gael’s traditional blue is sidelined a bit. Highlighting the use of screen readers on the site is very good, and though most people who have reading difficulties or sight difficulties will already have reading software on their PCs, it’s still never a bad thing to have more.

The site itself seems a bit cluttered, with everything crushed up together. There needs to be space between the Latest News section and the Focus On section. The biggest flaw is that the site does not have the news in an RSS feed. This is very poor form in the information age we live in and many parties such as Fianna Fail, the Greens, and Sinn Fein have these. The fact that Fine Gael launched a new site without this is very poor. Also makes my job harder getting the Party news section working.

Also the copyright notice says:

You are not permitted to copy, broadcast, download, store (in any medium), transmit, show or play in public, adapt or change in any way the content of these Fine Gael web pages for any other purpose whatsoever without the prior written permission of the Fine Gael Party.

Does this mean they don’t want us to use their content? Does that mean they don’t want people to download their policy documents? Maybe the legal eagles amongst our readers could clarify this.

The gallery part of the site is not showing that many images. I presume this is a bug that will be fixed in a few days.

They have an “air your views” section of the site, which is interesting. I wonder will they read or reply to any of these.

Is it just me or have some of the politicians pictures look like they have had a Photoshop touch-up? Seriously, the lighting just seems strange to me. For instance, the light on Richard Bruton’s face seems to come from the right but the light on his suit seems to come from the left.

They have films of people on the site. You can see Enda’s here. They should probably be streaming rather then downloadable. Putting the video on Google Video or You Tube might really reach out to people. Having it buried on the site, however, will limit the people who see it. Then again, after watching the video, maybe that is not a bad idea. It takes cheese to the extreme.

The site seems to be designed by a Northern Irish company. Why not a Southern Irish designer? Many of the results come back to finegael.dev.biznetprojects.co.uk. The .co.uk does not look well for Fine Gael; they must sort that out fast.

The site search is displayed well in the top left, which is very good as it makes it easier for people to find what they are looking for, unlike Fianna Fail who don’t seem to have any search function. It would be nice though to be able to add a Firefox search plugin.

The Front Bench page has errors. Seemingly the site is written in ColdFusion and runs on Windows servers.

Some pages seem not to be finished. At the time of writing, the Organisation page is very blank. They show links to the Dublin organisation but none to anywhere else in the country. This doesn’t look good for us down the country, but with polls showing they are third in Dublin, maybe it is not a bad idea.

Overall the site disappoints me. They had a real chance to produce something really good, but the site seems to be little improvement on their previous website. Their candidate Jim O’Leary’s website shows what they could have done; with such an excellent site, all he needs is a blog. What does everyone else think?