Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Leadership in the Websphere

When it comes to leadership Web sites I think that Michael Ignatieff still leads the pack, but I just took a sneak-peak at Stephane Dion's soon to be re-launched Web site and it's a vast improvement over the previous effort.

What makes Iggy's good is the interactivity and Dion's Web designers are moving in that direction with a forum and the ability to comment on different articles. There are also lots of news clippings and thoughts from Dion.

Many have lamented the lacy of policy discussion in this race, and while I view Dion as one of the handful of candidates that have been raising policy issues that was an area that wasn't fully developed on his old site. That has been rectified nicely here, with a plethora of video clips' speeches and articles all grouped under different policy areas, from the economy and the environment to agriculture and social justice.


The new site is not yet currently live, a preview was offered to bloggers supportive of Stephane, but I'm told it should be online shortly so keep an eye out.


It's a nice effort, but I strongly stress to his Web people and the Web people for all the candidates the importance of keeping the site CURRENT and updating it FREQUENTLY.


Web sites aren't a static thing these days, they need to be dynamic. There's nothing worse that going to an events calendar and finding only events from last week, or event just events happening tomorrow. You can have the best looking Web site in the world, but if the content is stale it's useless.


I know it's time consuming and laborious. I volunteered as a media/Web coordinator on a riding campaign a few years back, and I spent hours every night writing an e-mail update for our contact list and posting fresh content to our Web site. But if you're going to do these things, you've got to do them right.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Excellent point about keeping the website fresh. People check back as often as the content is refreshed. So the more the better.