As I mentioned while I was away on a cruise ship the Internet was very expensive to use. It was also VERY slow. Loading a page took forever.

I was happy to see that Election Geek loaded pretty quickly. There are some more design things I can do to speed it up, for instance some of the graphics can be optimized and shrunk but thankfully the only elements that were slow to load were the ads. Luckily the rest of the page would pop-up and then the ads would take their time. Which is fine. I am going to look at different ways of ensuring that the rest of the page always loads first and then the ads load second if at all. The content is what is important for users and if an ad hasn’t loaded in the first four seconds they are just moving on to the next page where the ad won’t load anyway.

I decided while I was online to check out some of the official campaign sites to see if they too loaded fast. It was a pretty broad mix.

I will say both Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama’s pages loaded fairly quickly. Not perfect, but not turtle speed either.

Fred Thompson’s took forever. The initial index page with pictures and the “please donate” and the “Click here to skip this page” nonsense that people always employ and annoys the heck out of me didn’t fully load. I actually turned the page off before it could because it was eating away at my Internet time.

Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani’s site didn’t even load, I had some kind of weird error from the server. Not my browser, the server. For a site that has almost nothing good going for it, I wasn’t entirely surprised. John Edward’s was also still crawling up when I hit the “logoff” button a minute or so in. I don’t have a minute to waste on a family portrait and a few buttons.

At $.50 a minute I did not want to load every campaign site but it did remind me of something that all Web designers should be reminded of as well. Not everyone in the world or the country has high speed Internet.

Really, I know its hard to believe but they don’t. Many people even use iPhones and Treo’s and other mobile devices to get to Web pages. These people don’t have T1 lines, they have simple browsers with fairly slow connections. So yes, I know all those pages of pictures and those graphics heavy templates look nice, but for those people living in rural America, catching net access from overloaded coffee shop wifi or connecting on mobile devices or from parts of the world that employ satellite Internet, your message will not be seen.

This message is even more important for sites looking to build everything in Web 2.0 world. That AJAX heavy application might be fun to play with but for a person who just wants to get on a site, find out what a candidates position on Health Care is and move on, it won’t do a lot. Election Geek heavily relies on a mysql database accessed with PHP and the application WordPress.

WordPress does an amazing job of loading when the template isn’t heavily overburdened. The rest of the site I try and write quick code that grabs the info, does a few calculations, spits out the results and closes the connection as fast as possible. Granted there is very little user interaction here but it shouldn’t take five minutes to load up a form and then have it pass the results even if you are trying to customize the experience.

Most of the candidate sites seem to use the EXACT SAME content management system. A system which undoubtedly has dozens of modules that can do all kinds of fun stuff but seems a little bloated. (For all the money being spent on Web by the campaigns you would think some of this stuff could be built from the ground up in a unique way! Granted that is not all the campaigns, but it seems like a good chunk.) But that is a whole other blog post.

I mention this because, as nice as building up pages and having the campaigns go out of their way for those of us who are normally on blazing connections, the real voters who don’t spend 24/7 on the sites in-house MySpace forum thingy aren’t going to wait around. THESE are the people campaigns want to hit. Why? Because these people haven’t had a chance to drink the Kool-Aid. They probably won’t either, but they could vote for a candidate if they see similar ideas, values and commitments. They won’t be on the site 24/7 but that is not what a candidate should be looking for. They should be looking for a vote and possibly a donation. How do you do this? By enticing the voter. Not with gadgets but with ideas, solutions, platforms etc.

I am 100% for fancy Web sites and applications. Remember though campaigns are about running for president, not emperor of cyberspace. All those studies that show people are looking online for information are probably true. People read news sites, blogs and probably stop by official campaign sites to see what the candidate they are interested in is doing. It is a giant leap though to believe these people are ready to donate their lives to an online campaign or that they are accessing the Web at an MIT lab on Internet 2.

There are real voters out there and some of them have real slow connections. So official campaign people, please make sure you build your sites for them too.