The Design of Politics, Part 1: Wesley Clark

So on Wednesday, Wesley Clark entered the race as a presidential candidate on the Democratic Party ticket. Since he's in the news, I figured I'd start with him. He's got an official website, and there's an unofficial blog. Let's look at the official site first.

1. Clark's Official Website
So the website is lean, which is understandable, I guess, considering the guy just announced not 24 hours ago. But it's lean kind of the way I think of Clark himself as lean: chiseled features, clean as a whistle, nothing to hide. The site resembles the man.

It shouldn't, if he wants to be able to a) get his message across, and b) get people to do the things (join, give money, etc.) the campaign needs people to do.

Stuff I noticed about this page:

• Top banner logo issue #1: The "Wesley K. Clark" logo is hard to read: The W and the C are lost in that big star in the background. Suggestion #1: Redo the logo completely. Suggestion #2: Lose the middle initial. Too many K sounds already: Wesley k-k-clark for m-m-my g-g-generation. . .

• Top banner logo issue #2: What's up with this weird "/04" stuff next to the word "CLARK"? It's so, I dunno, European or West Point or something. (NATO influence maybe?) Suggestion: replace with "in 2004" in big letters . . . you might get more votes!

  

• Top banner logo issue #3: Funny how there is the suggestion of five stars, in the background of the top banner logo, for this four-star general. Mmm-hmm, just a coincidence, uh-huh. :-)

• The text fonts are way way way too small. Unless you're strictly going for the 18-24 crowd. If you want anyone else to be able to read your site, 8- and 10-point fonts are not the way to do it. Imagine if the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were designed this way. No more screaming "WHEN" or "WE THE PEOPLE". . . and then where would we be?

• The 100 Year Vision: This links to a separate page, which might better be called "The 10,000 Word Vision." See the photo to the right. Dude: you're not in NATO anymore. No more big thick binders full of reports to publish. Here's what you gotta do ASAP: hire a really good editor, and cut this thing down down to 100 words --- the proverbial elevator speech --- and then hire a web design specialist who can paint that 100-word vision in the browser window in a way that people can glance at and immediately get.

• Perhaps the most important thing wrong with the homepage is that there's no above-the-fold hit-'em-over-the-head message that says he's running for president. Where does it say in big letters "VOTE FOR WESLEY CLARK IN 2004 FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES"? Instead all we've got is this sorta creepy -- in a third-world military junta sort of way --- "MEET THE GENERAL" message. Hi, General. Like, um, it's an honor to, um, to meet you. Um. Now what?

• Congratulations must be extended to MeetUp, Inc.. When can I buy stock?

• It's nit-picky but . . . "Women For Clark" . . . "Students for Clark" . . . "Blacks 4 Clark" . . . "Hispanics Clark"??? Note to Clark organization: you need a lot more links in your Grassroots list, and you might want to review the site names. . .

• The URL is "americansforclark.com" yet the TITLE of the homepage is "America for Clark". At least the campaign went and bought both domains, and they both point to the right place. Good move.

  

• Oh yeah. . . Top banner logo issue #4 (someone pointed this out to me this morning): Um, are those red and white stripes of the U.S. flag on the upper right within the top banner, under the word "Courage", or, is that someone's bare midriff, complete with belly button, and bright red underwear? :-)

2. The Clark Blog.
The design of the blog is, well, typical blog material, but clean, functional, and relatively easy to read despite the gazillion links on the page:

Stuff that caught my attention on the blog page:

• First thing that caught my attention? IMMEDIATELY? The "United for Clark" logo:

  This logo has got to be the weirdest, busiest, most downright violent logo --- political or otherwise --- I've seen since I don't know when. It's like what a U.S. Flag might look like after it's been taken out of a blender. Or maybe while it's still in the blender. (Oh and hey, notice there's five stars again. . . wishful thinking General, but it ain't gonna happen.) I'm not sure what it is supposed to symbolize (America at war? The big fight? World War III?) but the first thing I was reminded of was, ah, the Tasmanian Devil! Who knows? Please prove to me I'm wrong! :-)

• Quick: somebody go register wesleyclarkblog.com and point it to wesleyclarkweblog.com. I got confused. I bet 1,000,000 other people will too.

• The blog site is fairly clean, readable, straightforward. Pluses: the blog entries are short with very obvious links. Easily scannable. Good web reading for the attention-deficit-disorder Internet world.

• The talking head photo of Clark in the upper-right-hand corner is juxtaposed underneath with a Clark 2004 T-Shirt, and it reminds me of those ads where you can cut out different clothes and align them up under the photo of the model. All that's missing are some jeans further down the column under the T-shirt, and some sneakers below the jeans!

• The "Friends of Clark" list on the left-hand column is impressive in its length and density. Of course, it's like a Blogroll which for politicians eventually (if the politician's worth his salt) becomes a 1000-lb Rolodex. The official website above should steal some links from this blogroll for its "Grassroots" section. Hey, stealing links is how the web works...

• Hey: next-billion-dollar-company-idea #5,719: someone ought to create a Friendster-like service for voters . . . call it Votester (don't bother, it's taken), where people can contact other people who plan on voting the same way they do, at which point they can, well, um . . . nevermind.

• Nice to see so many comments appended to each blog entry. Political blogs may wind up crashing these blog systems --- what happens when these things scale to 10,000+ comments? Methinks they will in 2004. At some point the sheer scale of the 'Net will come crashing down on these communities.

• I like how the blog homepage totally downplays the stuff about him being a General. The official site ought to take this to heart.

• Bottom line, whoever's running this blog ought to be congratulated for creating what I think is a good effort: people familiar with blogs and interested in Clark should find lots of useful and timely information here.

Well, that's all for now. It's late. More political website reviews coming soon in part 2.

As always, I invite you to share your comments and observations in the space provided below!

Posted by brian at September 18, 2003 02:41 AM