Liberal Leadership Website Review - Update 4 (en francais)

Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff's webteam has done a complete overhaul of the site. Gone is the Joomla install in favour of Active Server Page (.asp)

Clean, professional looking and appealing. The menu is straight forward and simple. French/English available. About the only page that seems to be still under development is the 'Get Involved' page and this isn't a big issue at this stage as the well designed site offers numerous other opportunities to 'Get Involved'.

Mi Community is still there, but greatly revamped. The Mi Community Home Page is the Union Station of the campaign, connecting users to features. Based on Community Server 2.0 , the section will keep users active and engaged. MI Blogs, Forums, Photo Gallery, Multimedia Centre and Upcoming Events. Every feature execpt the calendar allow comments in one form or another. The blogs have permalinks and comments, no trackbacks. The new forums feature focused policy debates, an opportunity to debate on subjects of the users choosing and a breakdown by Province. (What about the Territories?). Emails went out to all the users from the previous site with a new password and login. There were 412 users when I first looked, 414 when I just checked the site again.

RSS is available for all of the sites content. No autodiscover on the home page, the RSS icon is in the bottom right corner. Clicking on it will take you to a page listing three feeds. The forums also offers feeds for topics and comments and I found another feed, 'Speeches' tucked away on the site. I think this one has the possibility of being a podcast.

Donations, Joining and Volunteering are easy to do. With the exception of the MI Community section, the options to donate, volunteer and join are easily available on every page. The Ignatieff campaign remains the only one with their own eCommerce section allowing for online donations. The reworked donations page is easy to understand and use. Pre-set donation amounts, user entered and monthly contributions are available. Standard phone, fax and mail donations are also available along with a form.

As with the previous site, policy is not really evident. This seems to be more a campaign decision/strategy than any function of the website.

Privacy Statement opens in a javascript window.

Significant improvement over the last site. Ignatieff's site now represents the gold standard for others to reach for. There are still many features that can and may be added to the site but in it's current for Ignatieff's site is head and shoulders above the rest.

8.5/10

Note: Ken Dryden's site has reverted to a placeholder page again. Expecting some changes and updates there after the weekend.

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Related Posts, Blogs and Websites

Liberal Leadership Candidates Website Review - original review

Liberal Leadership Website Review - Update 1

Liberal Leadership Website Review - Update 2

Liberal Leadership Website Review - Update 3

Rob Cottingham - other reviews on the candidates websites

Liberalia.ca - a Liblogs member's reviews

Liberal Leadership Odds - a great little site put together by Cerebus. Tracking many aspects of the race