Every now and then I stumble across random political websites in my many quests for knowledge. And, for the most part, they tend to lack basic asthetics or they come out looking like the new GOP.com - they're just plain bad and dire need to be tossed out with the trash.

A good political website doesn't mean you have flashy images all over it, or a massive twitter logo blatently plastered on the home page - as though you're trying to let your consitutentcy know that your hip enough to be their representative.

Good design is first and foremost about user experience. I'll type that again, Good design is about USER experience. It's all about those pesky voters and donors that want to stalk you online. They want to see what you look like, what you care about, how to participate, get in contact, or dig into your flickr stream so they can see what your kids look like...you know, so they can find out if your kids are they're prettier than theirs....j/k...but not really.

When first designing a website, you might think..."Well, I want it to do X, Y, and Z". But I'm here to tell you, that's the wrong place to start. When I sit down to work on a website, I start by writing a story. It could be a page long, maybe longer if it's more involved. But the idea here is to determine, what am I trying to get across - what is the message I want folks to hear. How do I anticipate visitors navigating through my site - and how does that relate back to my story? Why are folks coming to my website?

I'm a strong believer that if you produce a single piece of media - you must ALWAYS find a way to tell a story - even if you only have 15/30 seconds. <-- The average time someone might spend on your website after hitting it. 1 min plus+....and you're kicking ass. Job well done.

Content is the pivitol first step of any website. Focus on content (story) first, and you will end up with a much better product in the end. After that, focus on function. Then apply and use technology to help improve the story (video, interactive elements, twitter feeds, whatever). Don't just throw a twitter logo on your website to look cool. Oh, and let's try to mix up the colors a bit - every political website in the the friggen country doesn't have to be red, white, and blue. We got it. We know you're american patriots. Now tell us what you're going to do to make my life better.

So I hammered GOP.com a few weeks back, because they simply forgot about user experience. They wanted to be "hip" and "cool", with all the flashy web 2.0 stuff they could jam pack into a single website. Well, in the end, massive fail. A big pile of red hot...(I'll let you finish that one). Lots of hype, and no substance.

I'm going to praise the folks over at David Hoffman's campaign for working with a design and development firm that understands this. Great job guys.