Saxby Chambliss’ Video Heavy Website

Posted on September 8th, 2007
By Todd Zeigler in Politics, Video, Website review

saxby

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) recently launched a new campaign website that I find vaguely fascinating.  The site doesn’t look like any campaign site I’ve seen before and relies heavily on video.  Campaign sites have a tendency to all look the same and I applaud Chambliss for not being afraid to try something different. 

However, two things:

(1) On my laptop I actually have to scroll down on the homepage to find a Contribute or Join link and access the main site navigation.  Call me old school, but I think this stuff needs to be more prominent.  Design conventions exist because they help people navigate your website and quickly find what they are looking for.  Usability matters.

(2) Video is great, but you have to back it up with text.  The site features Chambliss talking about a variety of issues via web video, but nowhere on the site is there text expanding on the videos points.  Web developers should always remember that not everyone wants to watch your video and that the web is still primarily about reading good old fashioned text.  There is also this little site called Google that does much better with text than FLV files. 

Regardless, I would like to thank Chambliss for taking the road less traveled with his site.

<Via TechRepublican>

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Comments

  1. Justin

    Todd,

    Thanks for the coverage. We are working hard to create a great site that is informative and easy to use. Thanks again for the review!

    I’ll look into the get involved/contribute links. I see them as right across the center of my desktop. Maybe on a labtop it is not as visible.

    Additionally, we have transcripts of all videos on the site for those with slower connections and for those who prefer text.

    Thanks again for the input and for the review.

  2. Todd Zeigler

    I just saw the transcripts - must have missed them before. However, they are in PDF format instead of HTML, which is not ideal.

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The Bivings Report (TBR) is a source of news, insight, research and analysis on the web-based communications industry. TBR content is posted, created and managed by internet strategists, media/communications analysts, web developers, designers and programmers, all of whom are employees of The Bivings Group.

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