Edwards' Website: A Quick Review

I took a quick look at the John Edwards for President website tonight. In a word, it's bad. In two words, it's really bad.

Technical problems:

• The HTML doesn't validate.
• The CSS doesn't validate.
• Despite the accessibility statement linked from every page, it doesn't meet WAI or 508 accessibility guidelines.
• The javascript mouseovers for the contribute and signup links at the top of each page are wonky — the tooltips-like popups rarely pop up correctly.
• The cookies aren't encrypted.

Missing functionality:

• There is no contribute page at all, despite the fact that it is the most prominent link on every page. There aren't even any instructions on how to contribute by mail or phone — just a "check back soon" message.
• While the email signup page seems to work, I never received a confirmation/thank-you email.
• Once I signed up for email, the site remembered who I was and prefilled the other forms with my data. But the site should have been smarter — it should know if I'm already signed up for email, e.g., and not show me the form again.
• While email is a required field on the volunteer form, it's unclear whether filling out the form signs me up to be on the email list.
• The "contact us" page includes an address and phone number (not toll free), but no email address or form to submit comments to the campaign.
• There is no site search.

Error checking:

• Form validation is done mostly on the client side with javascript and CSS, so older user agents that don't support these technologies get an unhelpful error page that tells you to hit the back button but doesn't tell you specifically what you did wrong.
• In Netscape 4.0.4 for Mac, the state dropdown menu doesn't render, making it impossible to complete the form.

Design issues:

• The buttons at the top are just clunky, and look even worse when stacked.
• The logo graphic wastes a lot of prime real estate at the top of the page.
• The menu under the logo only goes about halfway across the content area, and looks incomplete.
• There is no way to adjust the text size in IE for Windows (which is also a major accessbility problem).

Positives:

• It's up. Gore in 2000 took his sweet time getting his website up and running.
• The content layout is nice and clean, and the way styles are applied to show form errors is pretty slick.
• They "Key Issues" section has lots of good content and was well thought out.

All in all, if Edwards had to get something up quick to have something up, OK — start working on the redesign now. If this is the "real" site, fire your designer and start working on a redesign now.