Signs of Improvement

A few days ago, I posted a rather critical review of the John Edwards for President website. One of the most serious problems I noted was the lack of an online contribution form, even though a contribute link existed in the main site navigation. Thankfully, this problem has been fixed.

Contact info and the donation amount are entered in a two-page form on the Edwards site, and the user is sent to an authorize.net secure server for the credit card information. The HTML on the secure server is very 1995 — just text, not wrapped in the Edwards site template — but it works. I made a small donation to the campaign, and while I didn't do much to try to break the form (except try to give $5000, which generated an error), the process was successful.

One thing still bugs me, however. When clicking on the contribute button at the top of the page, the user isn't taken to the contribute page. Instead, the logo banner next to the button morphs into a quick pitch with a "Donate Here" link. I missed this the first time I clicked on the contribute button, and just thought the button was broken. In the end, the user has to click five times to make a contribution: on the button, the banner, the contact info form, the donation amount form, and the credit card info form. That's a lot of clicking.

There is still a lot of work to be done to fix this site, but the fact that the site is being worked on post-launch is a good sign.