For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a website project for my dad’s local political party “Leefbaar Zoetermeer”. (‘Leefbaar’ means ‘Livable’; Zoetermeer is the town we live in) Since every self-respecting party has a website these days and the old website looked like crap I’ve taken the task of making something that meets the requirements and desires of the party and looks aesthetically pleasing.
First of all I’ve segmented the development of the website, so that it will be delivered in parts. (Something people in the field call iterative design and development) First of all, a placeholder was made that announced the new website will be coming soon. This might look like an under construction page… well, it basically is… We were all taught that ‘under construction’ pages are bad but that really depends on what you do with it.
Right now you can go to http://www.leefbaar-zoetermeer.eu/ and see the placeholder. It informs people that a new website will be emerging. But what it also does (and this is essential to good communication with your potential visitor) is allow them to have themselves informed of when the site will be available. This allows you to keep in touch with people that are genuinely interested in what you have to offer or are just curious.
The upcoming phase is the basic website. This website will be all about informing. One of the things I believe (political) parties don’t do enough is to actually communicate what they are doing. The lack of transparency is what I believe for most people the main reason for them not to trust politics and have little faith in the promises made. One of the purposes of this site was to make activities transparent to the public so that people actually have insight on what is being done with their vote.
The next phases will actually add to interactivity where we hope to stimulate people to contribute and interact with the party. After all, a party should be a reflection of a community as much as a city council should be the reflection of the citizens of the city itself. The goal is to make the ‘politics’ as accessible as possible for the common man.
This site I am building now is relatively simple. First of all I am not using any databases for it; all data is stored in XML files which are being parsed by the php dom extension. If in future data is being stored in a database it will always generate XML files, simply because it keeps overhead low (mysql connections are expensive ;)) and also prevent extra vulnerabilities from SQL attacks on a website.
Currently I am fighting with style sheets as they usually are the true pain of any website; make it look good in both browsers (IE and FireFox). The major bugs are out now, but there’s still some minor discrepancies to deal with. After that, it’s building some small extra features and then it’s release time… and I will be ready for my next project.