Let’s face it. Rudy needs a better website. Other candidates’ exploratory committees and campaigns have good-looking websites with lots of content.
John McCain’s website looks very sharp, it has good video feeds and is packed with information. It’s easily the best website of the big six campaigns. Mitt Romney’s website is also content-rich and seems to be updated hourly; it also looks more patriotic and less scary than McCain’s black-and-white motif. Hillary Rodham Clintons’ website looks more traditional in its presentation, but again there is plenty of content and it’s friendly to the eye. Barack Obama’s website looks like a well-designed myspace site, and is perhaps a bit over-friendly in its design (large, smoothed icons, etc.) which may be the point. I guess John Edwards is back in the mix of things now, thanks to being the victim of a name-calling over the weekend. His website loads slow – a cardinal sin for web marketers – but is very content-rich; I would suggest to Edwards’ campaign staff that all the video they’ve got requires a faster server than what’s being used now.
But Rudy’s website looks like it was hastily-thrown together at the last minute by someone who neither knows nor cares about such things. A good website probably won’t gain you any converts to your cause who have already committed to someone else. But it will gain you credibility with undecideds. It makes it look like you take the campaign seriously and you want to attract votes and tell people about yourself. Rudy’s website falls short of the competition’s. Surely there is more than one good picture of the man to use on the site, and surely there are pieces of news to announce other than the addition of this or that politico to the team (although that is important, it is also not something of much interest to the general public).
