San Diego Election Web Site Ranking 2004

sandiego.com's Election 2004
Campaign Web Site Ranking

Top 20 Sites - Post Election | All San Diego Candidate Web Sites | Press Release

Welcome to the first edition of the San Diego Election Web Sites Ranking. We've collected as many campaign web sites as we can find, compared them to each other and against standard measures of specific technical quality to create this ranking.

"Our hope is to provide a valuable measuring stick for campaign organizers"

Why? Why spend all that time and effort to collect, analyze and publish this information when no one is paying us to do it? For two reasons, one admittedly self-serving: to add value and build traffic to our site. The other aim is a bit more ideal. The web has grown in importance and it's role in American life with it and we're hoping to have an impact on its delivery and to some extent on its credibility as a source of information.

The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School just released it's annual report "Surveying the Digital Future". The two key statements of their summary relevant to the Ranking are 1) "…the Internet has become one of the most important sources of information for the vast majority of users." and 2) "…the number of users who believe that information on the Internet is reliable and accurate has declined…"

Socrates rated a democracy as the worst of ten forms of government because he thought it impossible to educate enough people to vote intelligently. He didn't have an Internet connection.

Part of the quality of information is how well it is presented. That's what we've focused on, mostly. Our hope is to provide a valuable measuring stick for campaign organizers to use to make their web sites better. We think that will improve the ability of voters to evaluate candidates and the more informed votes will, we hope, make wiser choices.

To show this is no idle pursuit, a study done by ad network provider Burst! Media and news provider MediaDailyNews release last week had this to say:
"Of the 16.3 percent of respondents who visited a candidate's site in the past but not yet this election season, 71.1 percent plan on doing so before election day in November."

In other words, if your site isn't any good, but your positions are, the voters won't be able to hear you. We're hoping that putting the focus on good interface, complete presentation and good web neighborhood practices will help stimulate more campaigns to build betters sites.

Our Qualifications

Who, you might ask, are these people doing the ratings? We at sandiego.com have been in the Web business since it started. We started life as San Diego's third ISP and our first installation disk had Netscape beta .93, Eudora 1.0 and Trumpet Winsock on it. Our first web site debuted in the summer of 1994. We grew to host hundreds of web sites on all manner of topics. Presently, the company focuses on developing a few large sites. We host and develop this portal, sandiego.com, plus the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau web site, San Diego magazine's web site, the San Diego Film Commission web site and we host the Port of San Diego.

"we were the first to register... KPBS.ORG... SDFAIR.COM... SANDIEGO.ORG... SAN.ORG... LEGOLANDCA.COM..."

We were the first to register doman names and then provide them to clients - usually as part of our services instead of selling the names themselves. That list includes domains like KPBS.ORG for the local public radio station whose web site we originated and managed for four years; SDFAIR.COM for the San Diego County Fair whose web site we also managed for four years; SAN.ORG the current site for the San Diego International Airport; SANDIEGO.ORG for the San Diego Convention and Visitors bureau whose web site we originated and have managed for nine years. We originated and managed the LEGOLAND California site when the park first opened and won Best of All Large Theme Park Web Sites in 1999 in competition with Disney and others who spent significantly more (sadly that site was absorbed by LEGO Corporate and no longer exists).

The survey designer, Mark Burgess, has written two programming books from Addison-Wesley ("Programming Clarion Professional" and "Advanced VIisual Basic") and nearly two hundred magazine articles including a column on User Interface Design. He consulted with Microsoft on their first web strategy in 1994.

Evaluations

To evaluate the sites, we used a few rules you should know about. We're not going to divulge all of the measures as we worked hard to develop them. Though copy cats will follow, we think/hope, we want to remain the authoritative source for this Ranking. The ultimate test is to visit the sites and see if you agree with our assessment.

First, we did not rates sites from incumbents that rely on their government funded sites. Likewise, we did not rate sites - or better said: pages - from candidates that relied upon a site architected and maintained by a third party organizations like the League of Women Voters or SmartVoter to which a candidate's only effort was to contribute information only.

We were tough on sites for a number of reasons, all for things that interfere with the visitors ability to digest the content. Among the notable elements we panned:
- Large home pages (download size)
- The main address redirected to a second page or location
- Using Flash as the dominant presentation mode, and to a lesser degree Frames
- Use of pop-ups

"We were appalled by the number of candidates for public office who did not have a web site"

We looked at page structure and whether the home page was properly constructed and handicap accessible. We looked at how popular the site was on the Internet, the types of information offered and means of contacting the campaign or the candidate. We checked for whether the site accepted donations (who wouldn't after John Dean…you'd be surprised) and whether the means were secure and encrypted.

We looked at presentation and made adjustments for readability - humans wear out in a few lines when reading 80 characters per line, for instance. And using lots of font sizes and styles and dark font colors on dark backgrounds was rated lower.

The whole point was to rank sites more highly that did a better job of delivering the information. In some cases a single egregious sin did not prevent an otherwise good site from ranking highly. Senator Boxer's site is over 600K, gigantic by most measures, but it's still in the top 20.

We have not evaluated the accuracy of claims or the completeness of each candidate's representation of their record or qualifications for office. Jefferson and Adams hired the same "yellow" journalist to smear each other in 1796 presidential campaign. Had they access to the Web, the attacks might have come through blogs and "news articles" published on their own sites. We fear some of that goes on with sites today. We hope by highlighting the well done sites, more will follow that path and being more accessible, their messages will be easier to digest, some eliminated as waste and others absorbed as nutritional to the voting experience.

We terminated testing for this version of the study on October 5th. Any improvements to sites won't show until we issue our update in three weeks, a few days before the election.

Observations

First, we were appalled by the number of candidates for public office who did not have a web site we could find. Of the 549 people running for office with direct representation for some part or all of San Diego County, only 186 had web sites.

[If you're a candidate and you don't see your site in our lists, it's because we couldn't find you listed anywhere. Let us know and we'll include you in the next round.]

"It doesn't take a big budget to put together an effective site"

Further, of the 186, about half hadn't bothered to create their own site, but relied on the one pager at SmartVoter.org. If our goal was to homogenize each candidate's appearance on the web, that would be a good start. However, none of the personality of each candidate comes out on those pages and there's little interaction capability there. Plus, you have to go to SmartVoter to find them in the first place!

It was significant that only two incumbents made the top 20. Of those it's unfortunate that Barbara Boxer's site is one of the two as it is over 600K in size. For San Diegans, the most broadband wired city in the nation, that's a long download. For the rest of the modem-challenged state, that's up to a three minute download for some and comparable to printing the newspaper on 4 by 8 foot plywood sheets and asking readers to come pick it up.

For the most part, even the badly designed sites are fairly straightforward in their presentations of the candidate. There are exceptions. The site representing David Roberts running for the Solana Beach City Council is one giant popup which means folks with popup blockers at work, like everyone on Earthlink, will get just a weird blue background with no images or text. Kika Estrada, running for the Otay Water District, gives you two choices when you reach her site: you can read her apology for a petty theft conviction last year or…you can give your name and email address at which point she will allow you into her real home page. I guess in that last part, at least, she's in famous company. John Kerry's site does the same thing (sans the petty theft story, of course).

Speaking of the Presidential sites, neither Bush or Kerry made the top 20. Kerry's site has an annoying splash page on first visit (and return visits if you suppress cookies). Someone in the Bush camp specified a European character set and then used a slew of page tags that don't fit the standard advertised in the code. (Most people don't track that kind of thing, but it confuses browsers causing them to spend time trying to figure out how to show things.) Both pages are large, Bush twice that of Kerry, and both pages flunked the Federal handicap accessibility guidelines.

Conclusion

The site that ranked number one, that of Mike Byron running for Congress in the 49th, was so well put together that its excessively wide text wasn't enough to rank it lower - the price he'll pay is that few people will read more than a few lines before they wear out. The second and third place finishers, School Board candidate Mitz Lee and US Senate candidate Jim Gray better represent the look and feel we think is most effective.

The top 20 represent bids for office from all over the governmental spectrum which shows it doesn't take a big budget to put together an effective site. And if you think web site names don't matter, look what happened to Dick Cheney at the VP debate this week. He meant to direct people to factcheck.org, a research site at the University of Pennsylvania but instead sent people to factcheck.com, an anti-Bush site.

Post Election Conclusions

As we had expected (and hoped), more candidates won who had higher ranking sites. Of the Top 20 in our survey, 11 won their races. It's a slim margin, but one that will surely widen in elections in the future. However, our results also show that simply having a web site is no predictor of success, where having a good web site gave the candidate or proposition the edge. In the overall rankings, more candidates who had a site lost than won. For the propositions, the opposite was true. Those with no web site at all were split.

In summary it appears from these results that having a well put together site contributes to a campaign. Just tossing something up won't help, but it doesn't appear to hurt. As the electorate gets more educated and acclimated to using the Internet to gather and analyze information, we believe this measure will become more and more critical.

If you have questions or comments, please send them to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

This Ranking was prepared by the research team. It is not necessarily definitive, authoritative, comprehensive, or current. It represents the findings, views, opinions and conclusions of the research team only, and is provided as is without warranties of any kind.

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