Before the holiday, my colleague Adrian Uribarri did a nice roundup of the best and worst campaign sites produced by Illinois candidates running for state and national offices.
Today and tomorrow, I’m looking at those running for county commissioner and county board president. I'll judge on three factors: Aesthetics, messaging and the ability to connect with the candidate.
It seems that many campaigns have stepped up their online presence, especially since Barack Obama went viral in the last presidential election. That’s no surprise – it’s imperative to have an online presence (which makes it odd that some candidates don’t have Web sites).
But the Obama team created a beautiful Web site with a clear issues platform and ways to donate and connect with other Obama supporters. To his credit Sen. John McCain had a solid Web site, but Obama was a trailblazer.
A year later, a lot of campaign sites appear to be mimicking Obama’s color schemes and layouts. It continues to be the standard by which other sites measure themselves.
Here are the best of them.
Maher, a suburban Democrat, is running for Liz Gorman’s seat, and his clean layout doesn’t overwhelm you. I’m not a big fan of seeing candidate pictures take over their sites like Maher does here (and he’s not alone), but this works. Maher’s issues (Corruption: He’s against it; Fiscal responsibility: He’s for it) don’t distinguish him that much, but he gets extra points for directing visitors to his Facebook and Twitter pages up front.
2) John Garrido
Garrido is running for the Republican nomination for county board president. He looks nice enough, like a guy whose campaign I would follow on Facebook and Twitter. While his most recent Tweet as of this writing is kind of boring, Garrido gets a big thumbs up for this one:
He’s a cop, by the way.
Garrido’s issues are laid out simply, and for some reason, I can tell there’s a real passion behind the words. Maybe it’s just the American flag at the top of the page.
3) Tony Peraica
Commissioner Tony Peraica’s never been hard to find on the Internets – just don’t look for him at tonyperaica.com. Peraica’s campaign Web site is unique, because it’s one of four sites the commissioner runs. In addition to the campaign site, there’s his law office’s site, his Reform Cook County blog, and the very helpful CookEmployees.com site, which has salary listings for every county employee (I’ve got my own gripes with this site: It’s often out-of-date, and it could be a whole lot more searchable).
Peraica's minimalist Web offering almost looks like a news site, with its four top stories scrolling. Peraica’s issues are buried beneath the fold, as we newsies like to say, but the site is clean and allows you to easily connect with Peraica.
I wanted to give a shout out to Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, because her site is the best of all four Democrats running for county board president, but the more I dug into it, the more shortfalls it seemed to have.
Commissioner Timothy Schneider, though, has a solid site. I like how he incorporates multimedia into the middle of the site, and teases to news and events before the fold. Aesthetically, it’s pretty basic, but overall, it gets the job done without being jumbled or buggy.
Honorable mentions: