Trevor and Beth have a website with a design that is refreshing and different than what is generally seen. Rather than having a solid background with a photo on a banner or in a post, the background is a photo of the candidates with solid islands of information over top. Their website is hosted by GoDaddy and created using GoDaddy's built-in website creator, WebSite Tonight.
The color scheme of the website is the classic purple and yellow as seen on many campaign websites of the present and past. I would be all in favor of them channeling their panther pride, but the pair uses blues and aquas for all of the rest of their campaign material (posters, t-shirts, buttons, etc.). The difference in color schemes makes the branding feel slightly disjointed.
One big and necessary change Trevor and Beth's webmaster made after the initial launch was the elimination of Flash-based content. Prior to the update it was not possible to link to specific pages on the website, and visitors were unable to scroll on pages when viewing the site on a mobile device. Now visitors can directly link to the separate pages of the website and the scrolling issue is no longer a problem.
What They're Doing Well
- Videos - This is the only one of the three presidential tickets that has decided to use video as a means to reach out to students. Not only have Trevor and Beth developed a YouTube channel (that unfortunately isn't branded), but they have a page on their site dedicated to the videos they post on the channel. They have been consistently putting out videos, and even uploaded a response to a student's video. One of the things they would like to do while in office is post a weekly NISG video blog, and this is a great start to that. It shows they are serious about that particular plank.
- Voting Information - While it isn't much, Trevor and Beth are the only candidates to have the voting dates and a link to MyUNIverse on their website. It's one of the first things visitors see when they visit the campaign site, so it serves as a great reminder for people to vote.
- Color Scheme/Branding - As I mentioned above, it would be nice to see a consistent color scheme across all of their campaign materials. It would also be nice to see a consistent typeface across the board. To my knowledge, there has not been a ticket in at least the past five years that hasn't used at least purple or gold/yellow in their color scheme. This ticket should take advantage of the unique and memorable color scheme that is different than what students are accustomed to seeing.
- Social Media - At first glance, the three icons on each page of the Trevor and Beth website look like links to their Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace(?!). However, they are just links to share the page on those social media sites. Upon examining their site, I found links to their Twitter and Facebook at the bottom of their platform, which isn't a very visible location. There is also a new addition of their Twitter feed on the Campaign Videos page. I would suggest changing the location of the feed to somewhere more visible because a visitor won't see the feed unless they scroll down the page. Adding links to these social media outlets on the home page as well as the contact page would be a small, but helpful improvement.
- Platform - A small usability improvement for site viewers would be to move the link to download the platform from the bottom of the platform page to the top. There is also a lot of unnecessary paragraph spaces between each of the platform planks. By removing the excess space the readability of the page would be improved.
Overall Thoughts
Trevor and Beth have a couple of unique aspects on their site that set it apart from the others. My favorite thing is that they are actively using video as a medium. If they add and change the location of some links, they'll have a great site.
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