Political webdesign: How well has the Labour party included social networking into their site design? (Part of the Red Vs Blue series)
Those of you who have been reading the Blink Design Studios blog for a while will know that there is a ad-hoc series looking at political web design and marketing. This is the latest in a series which will follow over the next few months looking at how the main parties have updated their site designs and also at select areas of their site design. This article focuses on how well the Labour party site has integrated social media and sharing aspects and functionality into their designs and how well those work as part of the overall site experience.
The Labour party site: An easy to navigate, simple and clean design as always; However, how does it fair now the web is so social?
The new site has a few useful and well integrated social media sharing features such as the share to Facebook and Twitter buttons which are at the base of the main homepage and also the integration to Tweet or Facebook status items from their ‘advent calendar of broken promises’ which do encourage sharing, it would have been nice for this to have been accessible from the front page rather than via a page change although this does allow them to feature more stories in the section.
With the inner page share to social buttons we have a mixed story, yes they are there, however only some items have share buttons and each time I found a post with one, it was using a different widget and design for the buttons. Also, some had more networks to share to than others and each used a different plugin to do so. The result is a choppy experience which feels a little crow-barred in the the design. They are definitely moving towards better social networking and sharing integration in their site design – however it is currently sporadic and in need of a single design team to oversee how it is implemented to ensure a consistent user interface experience.
The party’s own party Facebook and Tweet stream is placed right down on the bottom right panel of the page where it serves mostly to make shorter pages too long on the right hand side. This information is constantly updated and presumably relevant to readers – however it is currently hidden away in the least prominent position. Perhaps a single module with tabs to move between the different feeds would have worked better to save height and allow them to vary the content by showing different pages as the one on show based on page or refresh – currently this can often be the same latest tweet as you move around the site rather than either targeted to the page you are on or changing regularly and obviously enough to grab attention.
Lastly, although this ought to have been first, is the buttons to see the Labour party on Facebook, Twitter and follow their RSS feed. These are nested up next to the labour logo to the top left of the header. It seems that this area could have worked a lot harder for Labour – perhaps having the join buttons with call to actions over to the right with the latest tweet or other update as a one line attention grabber to try to engage the viewer and make better use of the large red header banner at the top of the website design. It might also have been nice to see the icons perhaps slightly redesigns to match the illustrated ‘How can I help’ Labour style icons as another way to unify the design elements into a cohesive and branded whole.
Next time – The Conservative Party website social integration review.
Click here to see all the Red Vs Blue articles on political design on Blink Design Studios.
