Some of you might not be too happy with this website… It’s a fairly right-wing political website, but I just finished the initial redesign of the site and am using a number of Expression Engine features in its construction.

I’ve also added a few features of my own, so it’s a bit different than most EE websites.  It has a weblog, but that’s not what the majority of the site is all about.  I mostly used Expression Engine so that the organization’s staff can handle the daily updates to the site without the need for technical assistance.

Anyway, check it out and tell me what you think…

http://www.moveamericaforward.org

Politics aside, I love how you have to register on the site that supports a specific nominee in order to vote in the poll for or against the nominee. Currently, I see 99% For and 1% Against and 1% Unsure. Do they really believe that this is even remotely statistically accurate?

Anyway, Douglas, congrats on the site. Using EE as a CMS seems to be becoming more popular.

Within the overall universe of Move America Forward supporters, those numbers are statistically accurate… Remember, this is a right-wing pro-military organization which is very pro-Bush.  For this specific poll, and among the public at large, I believe that “unsure” would be the highest polled.  The issue that is currently being polled on the site isn’t exactly hitting page one above the fold in the New York Times…

Part of the reason for using the new polling module in conjunction with membership registration is an effort to limit polling abuses from external organizations.  Many political organizations will not do real-time polling on their websites because the instant they post a poll, someone sends a rallying cry to groups like Free Republic to get members to jump on the poll hard and skew the numbers.  I don’t see people trying to freep a poll where the only way they can vote is if they first confirm that their email address is valid.

Plus, MAF wanted the polling to reflect the MAF membership, not necessarily the public at large.

Personally, I originally purchased EE as a CMS for a weblog on a different website, but what is really motivating me to use it on my client’s websites is the fact that once I train them on the CMS system, I don’t have to do the day-to-day maintenance of the site like posting news items and such. 

I guess you are right if they are really wanting to know the opinion of their membership only. I doubt anyone who had a different political belief would register on the site, though. From my statistics class for my MBA, I have learned that most online political polls are simply an exercise in futility and are extremely biased. This is an excellent example of that point made in the textbook.

Anyway, I have yet to play with EE. I have played with pMachine Pro and Free. I should go ahead and make the leap considering all of the positive feedback the application gets.

Actually, I would disagree with what you have been taught about the value of online polling.  As a political consultant, I work with statistical analysis and polling all the time.

From a moderately secure polling system (one that requires cookies or saves IP addresses) you can show both a general level of interest in a specific issue, as well as a strength of preference among those who are taking the poll.  Since it takes some effort to participate in online polling, you find individuals who are interested enougn in going out of their way to make their opinions heard.  With a system that also requires website registration, you are assured that only the people who have a strong opinion about the subject being polled are going to vote, so your poll ends up reflecting a certain universe.  In this case, politically conservative individuals who feel strongly about the United Nations.

While there is rarely a correlation between the results of an online poll and that of the public at large, you are talking about two entirely different polling universes.

Anyway, that’s the cool thing about the new polling module that was just created for EE, you can use it to secure an online poll pretty well, so you are able to develop a controlled universe, and then poll that specific universe.

The result is that you then have better information about your target audience, allowing you to adapt your message accordingly.  Why would you want to focus an effort toward people who won’t even visit your website?

I gather that the MBA you’re currently studying for isn’t a marketing focus, eh? 

Actually, I am no longer studying for it. I have the degree as of December. It was a marketing focus. I have a BFA in Design, BA in Art and a MBA with a Marketing focus.

I should have clarified my statement earlier by saying that the data gathering that is used sometimes is skewed to result in a predetermined/predesired outcome.

For example, I get mail from both the DNC and the RNC. We took a close look at the surveys they sent out and performed an analysis. We found a lot of bias in the phrasing of the questions themselves. (Sample question: “Don’t you believe,...") We had a great time tearing about the questionaires on both sides. I am not trying to pick on the Republicans or the Democrats. Just the whole political machine, in general.

I agree that a controlled, properly phrased online can be statistically valid and I was not taking a dig at the poll module in EE. All I was saying was that there is module on the page stating the strong support of a specific candidate and then they ask you if you support the nomination. Hmm. Lots of information on a site that puts itself in the position of being an expert and then they ask an uninformed public which candidate they should support. All while stating on this “expert” site that they supoort Nominee X. If Joe Public comes across this site, I can see them being influenced by the site’s support.

Now, if they gave an unbiased report on the candidate stating his strengths and weaknesses and then gave the public/members to take a poll, I believe the poll would be more valid. But a site that says we support this guy and take this poll is not really giving me confidence in this particular poll, not all polls everywhere.

I have to say that you mentioned ahead of time that the group states that it is non-partisan, but has a strong right wing lean. It was obvious to me when I read some of the material.

Also, I am aware of the differnt polling universes. There are many, not just public vs. online. I had not planned on getting into a discussion of the various methods of statical information gathering. I kept my discussion simple, maybe a bit too vague, admittedly. Either way, I have enjoyed this conversation.

One other thing.
Again, great work on the site. My only concern, from a design standpoint, is the navigation. It takes away from the look of the site with double rows of navigation. There is no structure to it. It doesn’t look like it belongs to the rest of the site. The grid design for the rest of the site works, but the navigation is center justified over two rows. Take a look at democrats.com or gop.com for their solution when dealing with a large amount of links. A simple solution would be to reduce the size of the logo to the height of the photos in the header. Stretch the navigation bar to the width of the page and reduce the size of the font to 12 and make it regualr instead of bold. Just try it on a test site and see what you think. Just some friendly advice from a guy who has spent the last eight years designing sites.

Have a great day Douglas.

bigMIKE

Thank you for the great advice.

When designing the new website for Move America Forward, I decided that the primary focus which should draw the attention of new site visitors is not the site navigation, but instead the special projects.

Move America Forward gets its site traffic mostly from the activities that they participate in, and most first-time visitors come to the website after reading about some current activity in the media.  I needed to do three things with these new site visitors, first I needed to steer them toward the projects that they were interested in when they came to visit the site, secondly I needed to reinforce the site’s name and the fact that it is an organization which manages constant political projects, and finally I needed to get the politically motivated site visitors to sign up as members so that the organization could maintain communication with them in the future.

The problem with comparing a site like this to the national GOP and Dem party websites is that people come to the two for different purposes.  Party websites are established, and site visitors know what to expect and what they are looking for.  They are looking for specific, partisan information, and you can get away with the level of information density that are put forth on their main pages.

With a grassroots activist organization, the site entry must encourage new visitors to see the organization as relevant and active, something that they would want to be a part of.

Personally, I do want to redesign the navigation links, but I don’t want them to be the main focus of the site.  I want to draw people to the special projects first.

Along the same lines, the poll located along the right hand side of the page is designed to reinforce the reason why most people are visiting the site at a given time.  Currently the organization is in the media for it’s anti-UN activities, so the vast majority of people visiting the website will be coming for that reason.  I configured the poll to also have considerable whitespace around it to set it off.  That causes people who are interested in the current issue to want to vote.  If they want to vote strongly enough, then they will go through the process of registering for the website, and the organization then adds another person to the membership list who is willing to go through a little work to make their viewpoint heard.  Just the type of person who the organization is looking for when they implement a grassroots drill.

The only thing that I’m not that happy about on the site was the incredibly long introductory message that I was asked to place there.  The powers that be wanted the main page to offer a list of the organization’s recent accomplishments, while I feel that a website’s main page should be focused on less distractions.  The randomly rotating pictures at the top of the page give off a general feeling of an active organization, without drawing the site visitor away from the parts of the website that you want to steer them toward.

Long explanation, one which I could probably have explained simply by stating that I identified both the target audience and the desired activity, and designed the website around those specifications…

Thanks again for the discussion!