Your Homepage Is Your Mothership
Yesterday I received an email from a friend needing advice on how to design a political homepage. My buddy does some create corporate work, but this will be the first time he’s designed a political site. In a nutshell, here’s what I told him:
Your homepage is like your mothership. Yeah, I know that’s weird, but you know me… I’m a pretty big nerd, so just bare with me for a few minutes.
Again, your homepage is like your mothership. It’s where your aliens live, it’s where they depart, and it’s where they return to experiment on abducted humans. The mothership is where the aliens coordinate their strategy and then leave to do enact their individual assigned tactics. They round up people and bring them back to the mothership.
It looks like this:
(Before you start yelling at me, yes, I know that the prime directive prohibits the USS Enterprise from abducting other species. I just wanted to show you that I could draw the USS Enterprise.)
That’s exactly what your political homepage should be like too.
You see, in today’s world of social networking, most activity happens away from the campaigns website on places like twitter, facebook, and youtube. Your mission is to use RSS feeds and other syndication methods to get your message from the website to each individual social network. But most importantly, you have to bring people back from those social networks to the website so that they can volunteer and donate.
It looks a bit like this:
Let’s take it to the next step, which is really a whole different topic. You have to make sure your alien spaceships can talk to each other too. You don’t want two ships trying to invade the same house, do you? They need to communicate. So when setting up your social networks, they need to talk to each other. YouTube videos should upload to Facebook and be promoted through Twitter. All tweets should update on Facebook. You get my point.
It’s a little messy, but it looks like this:
Speaking of messy, you don’t just bring humans back to your mothership for dinner. You experiment on them. Your homepage has to include a number of tools that allow you to analyze where your hits are coming from, what message is bringing them in, where people are spending the most time on your site, and most importantly, how to improve your operation.
As for the homepage design, make sure you have links to all your social networks and use the latest applications to not only promote those sites, but to bring the latest activities from those site to the homepage.
SC gubernatorial candidate Gresham Barrett does a good job with it. Check out his sidebar. You will see both a Twitter update and a Facebook widget. In the footer you will see links to all social networks.
Now you’re ready to build a great homepage and abduct a few human lab rats.