Website Design & SEO Tips

As the election looms I wanted to look at just how responsibly each major political party carries out its own policies and decided to do this by looking at website accessibility and just how careful they are about complying generally with the Guidelines for accessibility and general coding compliance. 
After all we want a government that is respectful, honest and transparent don’t we?  

With regard to accessibility the Conservative Party website has considerably more detail, including instructions on how to use the accessibility features, than are found on the Labour Party’s website.  I will not quote the contents here due to the length of the accessibility page on the site. 

Having seen just how much detail the Conservative Party website goes into with regard to accessibility I was very hopeful.  Shame therefore that, despite their protestations of being accessible, there were 4 WCAG errors and 2 warnings aswell as 13 link errors on just one web page, the home page.  Are they really that committed to being accessible?   The 16 fails (not just warnings) and 16 warnings on use of colour do not suggest they are. 

Alt text is very important on websites as this gives a textual version of the image used; screen readers, as used by people with visual impairment, cannot read images and so a textual equivalent is required, shame the Conservative Party website lacks these and has 7 coding errors and 2 coding warnings on the home page alone.   We need a careful conscientious government to sort out the recessionary mess this country finds itself in.  If political parties cannot get simple coding right then what hope do we have?  And, yes, it is the parties themselves that make these errors, you can delegate tasks but essentially you cannot delegate responsibility.  When delegating or sub-contracting there is a duty of care to choose a competent sub-contractor and in civil law if you do not show that you did everything possible to discharge that duty of care then the delegator bears full liability for the errors.  Sorry a bit of my law training coming out there, but this principle applies to government also, and although the construction of a website is, in the measure of things, a trivial matter  it goes without saying that we want a government that is careful and conscientious and does not abject responsibility. 

Although the 404 headers are constructed accurately, the main header h1 tag is used to say “Conservatives Logo”, which aswell as being grammatically incorrect  is an inappropriate use of the main header. 

Tranparency and clarity are a requirement of government and in my quick look at the site there does not appear to be any significant hidden text apart from the h1, however poor coding on the website means that lots of coding including the Google Analytics code show up unnecessarily in a content analysis of the page.  This is careless and should be remedied. 

Additionally, from an SEO point of view, the text to code ratio only comes out at 6.04%, slightly better than the Labour Party website but still nowhere near good enough.   

I have no political affiliations and shall now proceed to perform the same brief analysis on the other major party’s websites. 

If you want to see how we can help your website see our web design website or our SEO Commercial website. 

Gill Keeble
S3 Web Design and SEO4all

Related posts:

1. The Labour Party Website
2. The Liberal Democrat Party Website
3. Postscript to 3 Party Websites
4. Who Wins the Accessibility Election?
5. Summary- Accessibility Election

Tags: Conservative Party, disability accessibility, S3 Web Design, Search Engine Optimisation, website