How not to create a political website...

I spend most of the day (and yesterday too) looking up political candidates' websites to note their addresses. Many don't have websites yet - I assume they will get them soon. Many have terrible websites, or blogs they haven't updated in several years, or just Facebook entries. I'm starting to judge politicians by their websites. How hard can it be to keep up - especially since the Conservatives, the NDP, Liberals, and the Green Party all have template websites for candidates to use. Minimal work is necessary . I know candidates have a lot to do right now, but they have volunteers in place, don't they? It isn't as if we haven't all seen this election coming.

I like the layout of the Green Party websites. Easy to use, easy to understand, easy to communicate with the people running.

But some candidates (for varoius parties) are just mystery people with little or no web presence at all. How do they manage that?

Others have good sites, besides some fancy ones that are just propaganda. Some are difficult to navigate. Some have weird errors in spelling or formatting. No proofreaders? I'm developing a few pet peeves:

• Websites where the phone numbers don't have area codes.
  
• Websites where the addresses don't have postal codes.
  
• Websites that don't have a place to contact the politician or his campaign office for questions or responses - just a place to make a donation. Don't they see how greedy that looks?
  
• Websites where there is no search function for either names or constituencies. The Conservatives have a nice page where you can search by province or by postal code. I hate saying good things about the Conservative Party, but that's useful. The NDP, whom I love, only have a search function where you find your own riding by putting in your postal code - not too helpful when you're looking for a riding on the other side of the country, and don't know the postal code because it isn't on their website.
  
• Websites without any kind of contact information. Some have office addresses listed, and phone numbers; this is good. Some have boxes where you can fill in comments and get the politician to email you back. This is less useful. An ideal site would have both.
  
• Websites which give no specific information about a politician. I know everyone has security concerns, but what good is a democracy when a politician keeps everything about his or her life a secret?
  
• Websites without editing or even a check for spelling. On one site, different lines of two office addresses were juxtaposed in a way that made it difficult to read and impossible to tell which was which. Another site had the address right, but a letter was missing from the name of the town - a town I'd never heard of before, so it was hard to track down and figure out the missing letter. And one candidate, whose name is Sydney Garroch, has his name on the banner at the stop of the page as Syndey Garroch. Embarrassing!
  

I was amused to see that there are two candidates in London West (a riding in Ontario) with the name of Ferguson. I'd love to see the other parties get Fergusons to match them; we could have a poker hand of Ferguson candidates. Who are you voting for? Ferguson. Who will win? Ferguson.