Senate Site Review: Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
This post is part of our continuing series reviewing Senatorial websites.
The first Democrat in this series hails from the land of cheese and badgers. Let’s take a look at the site of Senator Tammy Baldwin.
AESTHETICS
What I like about this site design: clear imagery, and a good match between graphics and the subjects the Senator wants to draw attention to. There’s a clear and prominent call to action for joining the Senator’s newsletter, and most of the gradient usage is subtle. Nothing about the site is yelling at you, and as I navigated around I felt like I could find things easily. This is also the first site that (as of the time of this writing) does not plaster the Senator’s face all over the page. Personally, I like that, as it indicates to me that the Senator cares more about the issues than her ego. That said, a small picture somewhere above the fold would show me what the Senator looks like without my having to dig for it.
Things I don’t like: I said most of the gradient usage is subtle. The black gradient on the main hero image bugs me. It may be a side effect of my one displeasure with the custom graphics: the images have text, paired with text headings. It feels like a lot to be parsing all at once. In the site’s favor, the direction of reading is fairly clear.
RESPONSIVENESS
I’m uncertain if Senator Baldwin’s site meets a strict definition of responsiveness, but at the very least it adapts nicely to different device sizes. There is some weird spacing and layout on mobile, but the information and call to action are still prominent. The site is definitely usable on mobile.
Less credit is due for tablet. On an iPad, in both portrait and landscape, the user gets the full desktop site. While most of the buttons above the fold are large enough to work without pinch-and-zoom, the top menu doesn’t adapt or respond to tablet at all. Which is frustrating when that menu is obviously a dropdown, and clicking any of the header buttons takes you to a page instead of popping open the menu. The Senator’s site is denying tablet users the quick navigation available to smartphone and desktop users.
PAGESPEED
Oh my. This… this ain’t so good. Here for the first time in this series we have a Pagespeed Insight result where desktop ranks lower than mobile, and mobile doesn’t look too good to begin with. The Senator’s site clocks in at a whopping 4.8 MB, the vast majority of which is images. Probably those nice article graphics, which have been used at their full resolution rather than resized. For the sake of your constituents’ data plans, Senator, resize your images. The regular advice about CSS/JS compression and moving asset includes out of the <head> still applies, but the killer here is the images.
ACCESSIBILITY
Oh my, redux. I am fortunate to not possess any qualities that would traditionally qualify me as ‘disabled’. If I were, I would wonder if Senator Baldwin’s site was accessible to me at all. You might not be able to make it out, but that’s 22 accessibility errors, 33 alerts, and 81 contrast errors.
What’s especially interesting about this WAVE evaluation is that the site looks so ‘normal’ to the casual browser. The thing about accessibility is that you can’t rely on what you think, or even what the people immediately around you think. You have to reach and study and work to make sure everyone can have the best experience possible on your site. So, Senator, for the good of all your constituents: Alt text! Form labels! Better colors!
I have a number of friends who either currently live or went to school in Wisconsin. These friends are almost entirely engineers, and there are a number of excellent tech companies and computer science programs in Madison and beyond. I say this because I know there are constituents of Senator Baldwin eminently qualified to build an excellent site, or improve on what the Senator has. I hope the Senator hires some of them, and soon.
Originally published at www.technicalmajority.com.
