Whew! That was a hell of a speech last night, wasn’t it? I think I’ll go to BarakObama.com and check out what’s going on…
Splash page?! The tiny red box I’ve highlighted is the only way to escape the splash page and get to the real site.
As a web developer, I’ve believed for years that splash pages are evil. Jakob Nielson wrote back in 1999 that “splash pages are useless and annoying. In general, every time you see a splash page, the reaction is ‘oh no, here comes a site that will be slow and difficult to use and that doesn’t respect my time.’”
And yet, on political sites, the donation splash page – especially after big events – is ubiquitous.
I have only one experience of building a site for electoral politics. In 2006, my friend David Krewinghaus and I won a bid to create a website for Senate candidate Amy Klobuchar (I set up the infrastructure. David designed everything. If you’re looking for a designer, David’s great!)
The campaign was strongly influenced by Hillary Clinton’s website. At the time Hillary Clinton was raking in dough for her puff-ball Senate re-election campaign (she raised so much money that she was able to transfer $10 million to her presidential campaign). Hillary had a donation splash page, and so the Klobuchar people wanted one, too.
We convinced them that this was a bad idea because it would annoy people and hurt the usability and searchability of the website; and couldn’t they put a big donation button on the home page? This satisfied the campaign. I felt I’d done my duty as a conscientious web developer by putting the users first.
But it was only temporary. As the election approached, the campaign pressed us again for a splash page, and this time they couldn’t be persuaded. So we built one. My contribution to splash page usability was that it wouldn’t be shown if you’d already seen it.
I still hate political splash pages. But campaigns use them for one reason: they work.
And Amy Klobuchar? They call her Senator Amy Klobuchar now.
