Liberal Leadership Website Review Update 10 (en francais)

Michael Ignatieff
Still head and shoulders above the rest.

Atom RSS feed added. Podcast feed added, verified feed is working.

Recruitment Material added to the multimedia section (candidate card in .pdf format)

Action buttons added to blog post section.

Site now has 550 members, 553 threads, 609 posts. 65 users with one or more posts. The forums seem to be growing and the discussion expanding and maturing. Lots of blog posts, but none by Michael personally as yet.

8.75/10

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Stephane Dion
Action Centre titles have been converted to links (About Stephane, Why I'm Running and Get Involved). Events page improved.

7.5/10

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Scott Brison
First webcast of the campaign.

Audio from speech to the Economic Club of Toronto. If you managed to suffer through the 1/2 hr of elevator music, the audio quality was good. Now that the campaign has some audio, it might be good to offer it as a podcast, or at least as a download.

You can still click through to CNW site and listen.

Join page has improved. Site captures data now before sending you on to the Liberal party's online form.

7.5/10

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Bob Rae - no change noticed. As one of the official candidates, Bob Rae now has access to an online donation page to direct donations to his campaign. Doesn't seem to have made it to his site as yet.

https://www.liberal.ca/donate_e.aspx?cand=2%20

7.5/10

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Ken Dryden - no change noticed

7/10

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Gerard Kennedy
Directed online donation page at Liberal.ca active now, but you may have to look hard to find it.

First candidate that I've noticed with a Desktop Wallpaper available for download.

News Release section is underway.

Still a great deal of the site "under development".

7/10

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Maurizio Bevilacqua - no change noticed

6/10

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Martha Hall Findlay
Looks like the front page is starting to be overhauled.

Easy to find Join button on front page, 'Where's Martha Today', 'Picture of the Day'. Promise of a blog coming soon.

Lots of work still required.

5.5/10

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Hedy Fry
Regular blogging, RSS added, Event calendar now in use and updated.

Still lots of work to do here.

5.5/10

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Joe Volpe
Wrapper added to take people to online donation page - directed donation to the Volpe Campaign. This is a handy feature, but can be difficult to integrate. Most people should be able to navigate and use this page.

Yet another site with lots of work ahead.

5.5/10

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Carolyn Bennett
Regular blogging, RSS added for blog entries, guest blogging on Calgary Grit.

Promise of an online policy dialogue, but it has yet to materialize

5/10

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General Observations

Party has revamped their online signup page. Members can now join online and pay immediately with CC or request a form from a Provincial or Territorial Association. Individual candidate donation pages are now available for Official Candidates, but no specific link is available on Liberal.ca

What is it with some of these sites and .pdf files? If your link is a pdf file, you should identify it as such. I can't believe the number of .pdf files I'm running into when I expect a webpage or link. This may be just a pet peeve of mine, but it's definitely annoying. Still lots of 1 mb or bigger pictures floating around some sites.

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Blue Blogging Soapbox's Liberal Leadership Review Page - all the reviews and links to other Leadership related sites.

Note: I had hoped to attend Michael Ignatieff's event in Windsor this morning and blog about it later, but unfortunately a lack of sleep over the last several days has got the better of me. H/T to Marc for making the arrangements for me to attend and my apologies for not being able to do so. Hopefully Michael will return to Windsor later on and I will have another opportunity. I hope to attend any of the candidate's events in Windsor, as an observer, and then blog about them. We'll see how that goes.

For any of the Webmasters who might be dropping in, or individual candidate supporters, if I happen to miss new features or changes to a site, feel free to email me. (bluebloggingsoapbox@gmail.com). I try to keep a close eye on all the sites, but it's easy to miss something when watching 11 different sites.