What do you want to see on a political party’s website?

We’re reviewing the DA’s main website at the moment. It was built in 2003, and it’s long overdue for a revamp.

We’ve got what I think are some pretty cool ideas to make it fresh, interesting and entertaining – for example, we’ve picked up a few ideas from Barack Obama (although he probably spends more on his website and online presence than the DA’s entire annual operational budget) and the LibDems in the UK, among others.

But I’d love to get some input from users, web designers and online marketers about what they think would make an excellent party website. So I’ll keep our specific ideas to myself for the moment. I don’t want to influence or limit any innovative ideas that may be out there.

Mobile Websites made easy

One of the things I have been grappling with for a while is the need to tap into the Mobile Market in South Africa. We obviously want to optimise our traditional online communication and marketing, but the stats speak for themselves: 4 million people with an internet connection and nearly ten times that (~38 million people) with cell phones. What I haven’t seen yet, is data on how many of those cell phones are wap-enabled but, even if it’s only a third, that’s a huge market.

The problem is that the cost of building and maintaining a wap website worth visiting on a regular basis is still relatively expensive – the reason being that there are so many different cell phone models with no standard operating system, so you practically have to have a different website for each model. Not very efficient.

However, today a colleague informed me of a new innovation