Political Website Design

Having your image and graphic content ready ahead of time will make the design of your site go much smoother. Large, high resolution is best for a graphic designer to work with. Large-sized images can be scaled down, but small, low-res images cannot be improved much.

For political websites, design is crucial. Here are some tips for making your images shine through.

• Prepare at least one good head shot of the candidate for the home page. Consider having a photograph done professionally. If this is not possible, use a good digital camera with proper lighting. A head-on or three-quarter view is typical.


• Prepare images of recognizable landmarks, particularly if your issues touch on those areas.


• Use photos from public or campaign events throughout your site.


• Where possible, try to include captions.


• When using photos of other people for endorsements, it's a good idea to ask for permission first.


• The best shots for site headers are those where the candidate is standing before a neutral color. This allows the background to be more easily cropped out.

There are certainly more than seven ways to mess up a website, but these are the top way of making a campaign website less effective than it should be. Some of these topics have been elaborated on in other posts.

Bad Site Design: This is a subjective element, but a poorly designed website does not do much to help a candidate. For local campaigns, simple is best. Along with bad design, you could also lump in poor design practices such as overly-large image files, broken links and sites that do not look right in different browsers.

Site Doesn't Match Campaign Literature: Consistency of message and consistency of presentation are important in a campaign. When campaign elements do not match, it can be confusing to the voters. It's all about branding a candidate, branding a campaign, and branding a positive message.

Too Much Solicitation: Sites with donation buttons plastered all over them look either greedy or desperate. Designing a navigation button for contributions is fine, but when the entire website appears to have the singular purpose of hitting up supporters for donations, the efforts can backfire.

Not Listing the Voting Day or Location: This isn't so much a design issue, don't keep the voting date a secret! And don't assume everyone knows where you are located. Be sure to include your state in your website copy. This will help your site to be ranked when voters search a candidate's name in the search engines.

Lack of Content: Your campaign website should be fully built out before it is publicized. You only have one chance to make a first impression with voters.There should be enough content for people to satisfy voters interested in the issues.

There are a number of political website builders out there, but none of them combine the functionality and personalized design of an Online Candidate website. For less than the cost of a mailing, any local candidate can have a political website designed within days! Online Candidate sites allow you to easily update pages, build and email list, link to social networking sites, take campaign contributions and more.

View all our Online Candidate store, featuring digital books, campaign brochure templates and more!