THE POLITICS OF PARTY WEBSITES: HOW LABOUR, THE CONSERVATIVES, UKIP AND THE GREEN PARTY USED WEB DESIGN IN THE GENERAL ELECTION

Labour As soon as you land on the Labour Party’s website a message is thrown at you reading ‘Defeats are hard, but our fight for a fairer country continues’. Making such a powerful message the key signifier of the site shows just how influential a website can be in instilling a message. As well as playing with font sizes the site also employs a clean design, not bombarding visitors with many messages like their foe’s, the Conservatives. By focuses on their core beliefs (the economy, the NHS and housing) they entice visitors to interact with their site. Green Party Although sporting an older-looking design the Green Party did still use their website as a marketing tool, directing voters online through blog post and social media. Dedicating a section of their website to hashtags the Green Party did make an effort to trend of Twitter, jumping on bandwagons and getting involved in debates. UKIP For many of the political parties they will have expected millions of visitors over the period of the election, ensuring their website was geared up for this type of traffic. For UKIP this was not the case with their website disappearing off the face of the earth for several hours. Problems were first reported by blogger Guido Fawkes who speculated UKIP had ‘forgotten to renew the domain name of their official website’, something we at MOBO would dub a schoolboy error. If you are a political figure or just your average Joe looking for high standard web design then allow MOBO to help. Not only will we auto-renew your domain but we will also provide a design pegs head of any of the sites we have seen today.