gop.com vs democrats.org Posted by Jeff

I think this says it all...

On democrats.org, I see things like this:

<ul><li><a href="/a/party/chairman/index.php">Our Chairman</a></li></ul>

But on gop.com, I see this instead:

<td width="157" rowspan="3"><a href="http://www.gop.com/default.aspx"><img src="/images/RNC_indx_logo.gif" alt="GOP.com" border="0" height="51" width="157" /></a></td>

I began by pondering about the choice of .com or .org for these sites. Making a quick review of the above we see that the democrats use .php and good html structure. The republicans are using table based layouts, gif images, and aspx.

Using the w3c validator to check their home pages, democrats.org currently gets 27 errors, all simple things that I can easily see how to resolve, however gop.com gets 144 errors, almost all of which are grave sins in my eyes as a web developer, including the use of the long deprecated FONT tag, missing ALT attributes for accessibility on many images, and other critical syntax errors.

Judging from the navigation style, the republicans have horizontal dropdowns - very hard to use, normally... but they've opted to let them lag open for several seconds after moving the mouse off, which alleviates the problem somewhat. However, this causes the top portion of their page to become obscured and makes it difficult to click certain links in the page body. The democrats also use drop downs, not always the best choice, but they used the vertical style which is much more forgiving for people who have difficulty using the mouse.

Just look at the two pages.

My conclusion: The democrats hired a much better web designer.