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02/04/2004: "Quality Politics - An Alternative Look at NI Political Parties"
I was browsing the Alliance Party website earlier and I felt I had to comment on the quality of the designs. So many Irish websites are sub-standard (in my humble opinion) but some (not all) of these party websites are worth checking out.
So i'll do a little critique if ye don't mind...
Update: after doing the critique i'll change "but some of these" to "and few of these"
Alliance Party
Now here's a nicely presented site. The front page is excellent, good use of colour, links to the main sections, up to date maintenance.
I'll give this one a 9/10..
DUP
Good thing i'm not commenting on their politics and the slogan top of page. The web site is decent. The red and blue features strongly of course. Nothing special about the site though and way too image intensive for me.
I'll give it a decent 6/10.
Green Party
The Green Party seem to have taken a cheapie route by using a CMS, nothing necessarily wrong with that but the site is damn plain looking. The webmaster really needs to do a bit of work to brighten it up a bit.
Doesn't inspire confidence at all, hard to even find the title or logo.
4/10
PUP
The browser resizer is annoying, the design is very basic and it's only one page... 0/10 (lost their only point due to the resizer - don't fuck with my browser!)
SDLP
The SDLP site is decent enough, good bright nationalist colours, standard 3 column. Good use of photos, nice and clear.
7/10 (a few suggestions for improvement).
Sinn Féin
I'm not crazy about the Sin Féin site. It's well put together, clear content, no over use of images but the colour scheme needs work and the menus could do with a bit of life.
A harshish 6/10 with a thumbs up for being bilingual.
UKUP
Not much to be said, quite poor. The date says 2004 but the site says not redesigned since the birth of the internet. 3/10.
UUP
This is a good site! Nice and clear, simple layout with good use of colour. If they removed the top banner image and bring the top navigation bar up to the top of the screen i'd give it almost top marks.
8/10, point dropped for that top banner.
Womens Coalition
Stephanie and Chris need to do some more work. Could be a nice enough site but for the colour scheme which is not at all pretty. Some more design tweaks here and there are recommended too.
5/10!
So Alliance win it this time, the UUP were very close with the SDLP coming in a bit behind.
The DUP and Sinn Féin are down the ranks fighting for 4th. Isn't life better in the virtual world?
By the way, I just followed the links directly from Slugger O'T and didn't even bother checking the Southern Irish political party sites. That's for another day.