This is a guest post by Georges aka Uxsoup (Ux from User experience of course), it's pretty different from everything we see on the blogosphere. It's basically an assessment and evaluation of the political parties in Lebanon and how they portray their websites, and here comes Georges to recommend what they can do to make those websites of theirs more effective and informative as they should be. Enjoy.
Politics, the daily bread of us Lebanese, even the ones who say that they are not affiliated and do not support anyone, we all are in a way or another.
It's not the topic of my post but I need to get this off my chest: Political websites in Lebanon are a bad version of Geocities.
In web design, Lebanese firms do not set the trend, they follow the trends. They don't educate the customer, they follow to the letter what the customer wants. They don't consult, they just nod to whatever the customer wants.
Why are Lebanese political parties websites in bad shape?
I am not going to dwell into the aesthetics part, but more of a quick review of the functionalities and purpose of the site.
To tackle this, the first thing we have to look at is what's the purpose of the site?
Politics, the daily bread of us Lebanese, even the ones who say that they are not affiliated and do not support anyone, we all are in a way or another.
It's not the topic of my post but I need to get this off my chest: Political websites in Lebanon are a bad version of Geocities.
In web design, Lebanese firms do not set the trend, they follow the trends. They don't educate the customer, they follow to the letter what the customer wants. They don't consult, they just nod to whatever the customer wants.
Why are Lebanese political parties websites in bad shape?
I am not going to dwell into the aesthetics part, but more of a quick review of the functionalities and purpose of the site.
To tackle this, the first thing we have to look at is what's the purpose of the site?
- Raise awareness about the political party.
- Raise funds
- Recruit
- Campaign
- Engage
- News
- Act as a news portal
- Act as a news portal
- Latest trend is having "entertainment and artsy" news.
- Heavily ad supported
Just go quickly through the gallery to view the current state of the Lebanese political sites and download this (PDF - 5MB) short/quick/guerilla notes (doesn't even qualify as a study) of an american political party site and you can see the difference.
p.s. I really REALLY really advise you to check out this case study (PDF 5MB) done by Uxsoup, especially for web designers and content managers out there. YOU NEED TO SEE THIS. Hope you enjoyed reading this very informative and insightful guest post as much as I did when Georges sent it to me.
Hope
