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 the main political parties are about complying generally with the guidelines for accessibility and general coding.  After all we want a government that is respectful, honest and transparent don’t we…..

Labour

I have first looked at the Labour Party website and with regard to accessibility they say;

“The Labour Party is an inclusive member-based organisation that prides itself on being accessible to all who share its values.

We believe that it is important to make our website accessible to all potential users. With this in mind we have worked hard to improve the website for people with all disabilities and impairments.

We aim to ensure the availability of “alt text”, a simple and clear approach to online layout and improved colour contrast.”

Excellent! Or so I thought.  I suppose it is an oversight then that  on the home page of  The Labour Party website there are over 40 Warnings on use of colour.  Any sight impairment including that that comes from age, makes reading print much harder particularly when the print is not bright enough or there is insufficient differential between the text colour and the background colour.  Most people over the age of 45 will know exactly what I mean.  And are they really that committed to “being accessible” when there are 25 errors in compliance with the accessibility requirements of WCAGv2 and 1 warning?  And remember this is only on the home page.

Now, that “alt text” the Labour Party refer to on their website, (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), that surely must be there – but no, along with the other 83 html coding errors and 45 warnings, there are alt attributes missing.   It goes without saying that we want a government that is careful and conscientious but even the meta tags on the website are wrongly constructed, the 404 headers fail and there is no main header h1 tag, a website basic.

Transparency and clarity must also be requirements of government however having looked at the source code for the home page as well as the view as seen by a search engine there is clearly a great deal of text that is available to the website visitor BUT NOT to the search engines.  The section of text not appearing in the search engine view is the scroll of donators comments, I hope this is not to ensure that the search engines only see what the labour party want it to see whilst the website visitors see a different view.  I was a little stunned by this and so have run the site through numerous online textual content extractors but they all show the same search engine view.  Do let me know if I am wrong on this.

Additionally from an SEO point of view the text to code ratio only comes out at 5.97% but this might be because of the factor mentioned above ie the picture The Labour Party are showing the electorate is quite different from what they present to the search engines, in my opinion.

Conservatives

With regard to accessibility the Conservative Party website has considerably more detail than on the Labour Party website, including instructions on how to use the accessibility features.  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 as well as 13 link errors on just one web page, the home page.  Are they really that committed to being accessible?  

And why is it they ignore the large proportion of the electorate with impaired vision?  And, by this, I do not mean just those registered with a disability I mean people like me in their forties where age can cause quite a few problems with sight.  I say this because the Conservative Party website has 16 fails (not just warnings) and 16 warnings on use of colour.
The Conservative Party website also has 7 coding errors and 2 coding warnings on the home page alone.  The rules on coding are not difficult to adhere to.  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 any 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 ignore its responsibilities.

Although the 404 headers are constructed accurately, the main header h1 tag is used to say “Conservatives Logo”, which in addition to being grammatically incorrect is an inappropriate use of the main header which should always provide an indication of the contents of the web page.  Also poor coding on the website means that coding including the Google Analytics code show up unnecessarily in a content analysis of the page.  This is careless.

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.  

LibDems

Of all of the sites I have looked at the Liberal Democrat website annoys me the most.

Of all three parties The Liberal Democrat Party website has the least written on their site with regard to accessibility.  They say;

“This Web site has been produced with a view to being accessible by all people, with varying abilities, viewing the site via numerous electronic devices.

Influenced by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as recommended by W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, the site, both in respect to design and construction, aims to deliver content that is easy and consistent to navigate as well as being readily accessible to as broad an audience as possible.”

These statements pay lip service to the requirements for accessibility and, believe me, I do not just mean accessibility for those with any form of disability.  The website has been set up with a “splash” page which, apart from being incredibly outdated, makes the website difficult to use.  The home page has a 302 redirect on it which meant that, no matter how I tried, I could not check the validation of the home page so my comments below are based on an inner page, namely “What We Stand For” and therefore I cannot, necessarily, make a direct comparison with the other 2 main political parties. As I do not have a screen reader to hand I cannot check how the 302 redirect affects the functioning of a screen reader.

I am sure that the Lib Dems would love to perform better in elections, so why is it they also ignore the large proportion of the electorate with impaired vision?  The Liberal Democrat website fails dreadfully with regard to colour and accessibility; it has 5 fails and 57 warnings with respect to use of colour on just one page (“What We Stand For”).  Text on a web page has to be sufficiently bright and different to the background colour to enable it to be easily read.  Do remember this is only a quick check, if indeed text has been placed over graphics then this test will not have picked up on those errors.

As mentioned earlier “alt text” for images is very important when it comes to screen readers for the visually impaired and indeed for search engines.  Neither screen readers nor search engines can read images.  Again, the Liberal Democrat website performed worst in this area.  Of the 17 image tags on this page only 7 had the alt attribute filled in.  Strangely, a W3C test for coding quality shows the page as error free despite the missing alt text however the website only appears to be HTML compliant because EMPTY alt tags have been written in the code.  So what you see, ie apparently fully valid code, is not what you get, ie empty alt tags; an empty promise of no use to a person with a sight impairment using a screen reader.

The 404 headers are also wrongly constructed and although there is a main header h1 tag, it looks as if this has been placed well off the screen using the -9999px trick favoured by graphic designers.  However Matt Cutts of Google, in a video in June 09, made it quite clear that this was bad practice as anything not viewable by the website visitor is hidden text and was viewed as such by the Google algorithm and penalised.  Hidden text is, in essence, deceitful and not acceptable.

Transparency and clarity are vital for a government of this country as is trustworthiness otherwise why will the electorate vote for any particular party.  It seems fair therefore that if the Lib Dems say on their website;

“Influenced by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as recommended by W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, the site, both in respect to design and construction, aims to deliver content that is easy and consistent to navigate as well as being readily accessible to as broad an audience as possible.”

that we should be able to expect their website to comply with the guidelines.  Why then is it then that this page has 1 WCAG error and 10 warnings? Plus 2 link errors.  Remember however that this analysis is on an inner page not the home page as for the other Parties.  Home pages normally have more functionality and graphic effects than inner pages so there could possibly be more errors.

Additionally from an SEO point of view the text to code ratio is only 15.43%, which is better than the other 2 parties but still not very high and, as I said above, this analysis is not for the home page unlike for the other 2 parties. I suspect that the home page would have a lower text to code ratio.  Also the Liberal Democrats have not bothered with any meta description for their website pages which is just lazy.

I have no political affiliations and hope my analyses have given you food for thought.

If you want to see how we can help your website see our website www.s3webdesign.co.uk or our SEO Commercial website www.seo-commercial.co.uk. 

Gill Keeble
S3 Web Design and SEO Commercial
copyright 2010 Gill Keeble

Related posts:

1. Summary- Accessibility Election
2. The Labour Party Website
3. The Conservative Party Website
4. The Liberal Democrat Party Website
5. Postscript to 3 Party Websites

Tags: conservative, disability accessibility, election, labour, liberal democrats, political party, website