Senate Site Review: Senator John Barrasso (R-WY)
This post is part of our ongoing series reviewing the sites of U.S. Senators
Let’s get right to it. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, how is your website these days?
AESTHETICS
Sometimes, I wonder if my testing conditions are being unfair to the sites of these Senators. I’m looking at everything on a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and I worry this is unfair for two reasons: First, Retina makes non-Retina images (especially parts of sites that should be text but are rendered as an image) look quite poor. Second, my screen size is nicely wide, but perhaps shorter than the average? When looking at the site of Senator Barrasso, I feel a twinge of size envy.
Then I step back, and remember two things. First, a lot of users these days are on smaller devices, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, in all sorts of orientations, so my screen is probably representative enough. Second, with the sheer number of Apple devices that have been sold in the U.S., the chance of any Senate site being viewed on a Retina screen is fairly high.
And for what it’s worth, the Senator’s site looks pretty good on a Retina screen. The header image looks alright, although I would prefer it was text instead of an image (this is a complaint about pretty much every Senate site I’ve seen so far). The row of buttons at the bottom is cut off, yes, but I can forgive that by appreciating that the content above the fold isn’t too busy. My eye is drawn exactly to what (presumably) the Senator wants, which is the news items carouseling through the hero section. The email signup and social buttons are prominent CTAs, even if I have to scroll a bit to get them.
My minor complaints are with the header. You might not be able to tell at this scale, but that white bar takes up a good fifth of the real estate on my screen, and a bit of shrinking may allow me to see the whole row of buttons at the bottom. Also, the fact that the header is sticky, and moves with the screen when the user scrolls (since this is the subjective part of the review, I’ll mention I despise sticky headers) means that fifth of the screen is always lost to a menu I’m uncertain I need.
My initial aesthetic impressions of Senator Barasso’s site were neutral-to-positive. It looks fairly modern and well-kept. It gets the job done, and makes the Senator look good. When I viewed the site on mobile, however, my estimation went up quite a bit.
RESPONSIVENESS
Senator Barrasso’s site does really well on mobile viewports. It’s the first site I’ve covered here that I feel good about calling ‘responsive’. The content is the same at each size, just resized to fit the viewport. Most impressive is those rows of tiles below the hero content.
The tiles actually change size and add more rows as the screen gets smaller. Impressive! This is another thing that companies and sites with (presumably) larger web teams get wrong.
PAGESPEED
Viewing Senator Barasso’s site on a mobile viewport is enjoyable, but part of a good mobile experience is speed. Pagespeed is definitely an issue for this site. This is the lowest mobile score we’ve seen in this series, which is a shame given the above responsiveness. Desktop is also no paragon of performance, but that 66 is roughly average for the sites tested so far. The culprits on both are the same they’ve ever been: optimize images, move assets out of the <head>, minify assets. If I say this enough times, maybe it’ll start happening.
Those responsive tiles are really nice, but if they come at the cost of large, un-resized images, I’m not sure they’re worth it.
ACCESSIBILITY
I’m filing this one under “pretty good”. Those three accessibility errors are for empty links, which isn’t great but not fundamentally broken. The contrast errors are a bit more concerning, as the many shades of blue make distinguishing between elements more difficult than it needs to be. I believe that Senator’s site is fairly accessible, and I probably wouldn’t hate having to go through it with a screenreader. (Although a podcast of a screen-reader going through a Senator’s site sounds pretty amusing.)
If it weren’t for that abysmal mobile pagespeed score, I would be tempted to give Senator Barasso’s site the highest marks yet. As it is, it’s still a good site, but it’s so close to being a great site that I’m left a little disappointed by the miss.
Originally published at www.technicalmajority.com.
