Part 1 of the Websites for Members of Parliament (MPs) series see us visiting Martin Horwood’s website, Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham.
Design
Overall the site is pleasant and well laid out with a bold colour scheme of yellow and black, which matches the party colours. The layout is familiar to most users with a navigation bar at the top and main content in the middle. The nice friendly image of Martin superimposed on the Devil’s chimney gives the site a welcoming and friendly feeling. There’s nothing to set the world alight from a design perspective, but it remains functional.
However there are a few niggling issues which mark it down. The navigation, which although straight forward, is a bit small and could easily be missed. Also it was built using images, which given that each image is the name of the link render in Arial or similar font, there’s really no need to use images at all. Also it would have been nice to also use more visual guidance for when the user hovers over the navigation items or to indicate the currently active page. Similarly the use of the standard blue colour for links in the main content lets the side down. It would have been nice to see something more in keeping with the overall site aesthetic.
On the plus side however there is an attempt at constructing the web pages correctly by divorcing content from presentation. In other words the HTML used to build the page structure and house the content is held in a separate file to the CSS used for presentation. This shows some attention to detail and a nod to web standards, but disappointingly is a half-hearted attempt.
Engagement
The biggest thing going for is the amount of content supplied, particularly Martin’s news section. A lot of care is taken to publish relevant and timely news articles, which help the visitor get to know more about Martin and the Lib Dem’s policies and views, particularly for local issues. It can seem a bit overbearing as there’s no published date so you have to assume reverse chronological order and also no ability list by date or topic, however the search function does come in handy. Also an RSS feed would really add value here.
There’s also a series of videos for the more interactive users amongst us, which is encouraging and shows an eye on the current and future needs of site visitors.
The contact form is good, capturing only the necessary information, but also supplies more traditional means of communication with Martin such as phone or postal address.
Accessibility
The accessibility of the site is quite poor mainly due to a lack of attention to technical detail which means some users will experience difficulties.
For example the site does not validate as HTML as no doctype declaration is supplied! Without a doctype declaration the web browser doesn’t know what language to use, resulting in rendering issues meaning that anyone using anything but Internet Explorer get a less than satisfactory experience.
Not only that but the site is mainly a table based layout, which is bad. As the W3C says:
HTML is a structural language, which means it is - or should be - used to add structure into a text through tags. The table tag should then only be used to format data into a table to relate columns with rows.
In other words use tables to display tabular data, not for layout.
Also the use of the marquee element is just plain wrong. Not only is it deprecated, it’s know to cause problems for users with visual impairments or difficulties tracking moving text. Browser support is patchy at best, so there’s no guarantee it’ll work for everyone.
The page title doesn’t convey much other than the websites address, in this case “http://www.cheltlibdems.co.uk/”. Used correctly this element can help users understand more about the site, particularly ones using screen readers, but also improve search engine rankings. Perhaps a better one could read “Martin Horwood - Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham”.
The biggest boo-boo to my mind is the complete reliance on images for navigation. If you have images switched off, particularly ones using a text-base web browser, the site becomes completely unnavigable. I don’t know where I am or where I can go!
Summary
A good site with lots of relevant content and links will keep most users happy. However the lack of attention to technical detail will impede some users, disabled or otherwise, ability to successfully navigate the site. Because of this I can only give Martin Horwood’s site 2 our of 5 stars.
