In a minor league “October surprise,” LP.org launched a site redesign two weeks before the election. Wes Benedict wrote to LNC:
Expect lots of problems, and lots of fixes, some within minutes and hours, others days or weeks.
Some members voiced strong criticism of the timing and other issues with the site redesign/public launch. Kevin Ludlow’s initial response is here. Additional messages in the thread can be read by following the “Next message (by thread)” links at the bottom of the page.
“Trash it and start over.”
And do the same for the logo and the weird gray and yellow color scheme. It’s terrible — the yard signs and bumper stickers look like they were made for Confederate reenactors. Hard to read, too many fonts, bad logo. Ugh. It all bothers me so much. High a real agency and spend a few bucks!
Quite a sad situation. The back end infrastructure is not even close to the performance of the old system. The switch internally from a base url of lp.org to http://www.lp.org indicates a misunderstanding of marketing, system design, or of even how a web server is configured. Rather than configure dual virtual hosts with the same directory path, they are doing a redirect that takes an incredibly long time to complete. And SSL? Completely F’d up!
The person or people who set this up should be sued. Paid or volunteer, this is still something that in the “real world” comes under errors and omissions.
It gets worse when you consider that the new design is cluttered, difficult to navigate, and changes the image of the party in a significantly negative direction.
Two thumbs down, and a 2 on a scale of 10 for technical ability of the company that did this. Having registered literally tens of thousands of domains and built thousands of non-wordpress websites over the past 20+ years including projects that won awards, I can say I would never recommend hiring them.
Trash it and start over.
Austin Cassidy wrote:
The LNC passed a motion last term giving Kevin Ludlow unilateral authority to redo the website because he was an LNC member at the time and they trusted him. The LNC lacked much in the way of technical know-how and cared more about flashy graphics than technical execution. They argued extensively about how much money to allocate, never discussing at all the folly of the unilateral authority.
In theory the chair is overseeing. In reality, the chair put his complete trust in Ludlow — probably partly for internal political reasons — and is highly deferential. Staff is also highly deferential to Ludlow. The newly populated IT committee is highly deferential to Ludlow.
A lot of the technical decisions seem to have been made by Ludlow. It’s unclear to what extent the chair had a say or staff had a say on the technical details or the content selection or the timing. Right now in the murkiness of not knowing who is responsible for what, the LNC has no clue who is making decisions. That’s fine though because the LNC doesn’t seem to care who is making the decisions or about the decisions being made either.
I’m sure the people who arranged this debacle will escape blame somehow and be re-elected to the LNC. Why have a working website during a presidential election? That’s so quaint.
So who is ultimately driving all these bad decisions? The LNC? The office staff?
“We re-ran the script several times this week to see if staff added any redirects…they only added one page: /contribute.”
Lol..
Quite a bit of man hours to manually recreate the old Drupal content listed in those links back into WordPress….Typically, SEO placement built up in search engines over the years is quite valuable. Even if you aded the content back in slowly, its going to go dark in the major search engines(in terms of comparative placement). It would be like lp.org just launched in Nov. 2016. Effectively, a historical organizational scrub…
Chuck Moulton wrote:
http://hq.lp.org/pipermail/lnc-business_hq.lp.org/2016/006919.html
Chuck Moulton said: “and dropping ‘Party of Principle’. ”
Considering what the Johnson/Weld ticket has done, dropping “the Party of Principle” slogan is truth in advertising.
dL wrote:
Yep. That’s basic stuff.
Unfortunately, my sense is no one on the LNC gives a damn about the technical problems and the data loss. The few people on the LNC talking are dwelling on other issues with the rollout, such as the meeting minutes archive and dropping “Party of Principle”. That’s because the few technical people on the LNC are hopelessly deferential.
It’s really bad, but it fits with all the other rebranding efforts they’ve undertaken in the last couple years.
The terrible new logo, new colors, etc. What is the point of all this? Hire professionals to do the work right the first time.
The party’s website back in 2002, while obviously dated looking, is more visually appealing than the current gray and yellow mess…
https://web.archive.org/web/20020801070450/http://www.lp.org/
I mean look at 2008… what happened to the bright blue and gold? The Statue of Liberty?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080227200225/http://www.lp.org/
The 2013 site looked even better…
http://web.archive.org/web/20130317033356/http://www.lp.org/
I’m sure a refresh needed to be done to improve the site for mobile devices, but this is not good.
“Stewart Flood and I programmed up a few scripts to scrape a list of all Google search links to LP.org pages, then checked each of those URLs for 404 errors.
We discovered 83% data loss.”
as I wrote: ” 10K or so(or even more) is about right for a nontrivial WordPress site if extensive organizational content migration is involved in the contract”
First rule: organizational site redesign/relaunch can kill your google SEO, particularly if the URLs have changed. Generally speaking, if URLs have changed, you should NEVER do a partial content push out. You have to put a programmatic script in place that parse 404 into 301(for Google SEO purposes AND actually redirect to the content’s old Url to the new Url). At the time of the relaunch.
Extensive organization content migration can involve quite a bit of effort and planning. Sort of why i was scoffing at the lowballed figures being thrown around(as if you merely changing out a store bought template theme in WordPress). The old site was non-responsive HTML4 on Drupal. The new site is HTML5 responsive migrated[sic] to WordPress.
Chuck Moulton wrote (10/25/2016 at 9:29 pm):
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2016/10/open-thread-for-october-2016/#comment-1460407
Chuck Moulton wrote (10/26/2016 at 4:37 pm):
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2016/10/open-thread-for-october-2016/#comment-1461122
Caryn Ann Harlos wrote (10/26/2016 at 4:44 pm):
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2016/10/open-thread-for-october-2016/#comment-1461127
Sorry I wasn’t clear… I’ve been taking action, not having discussions.
George Phillies wrote (10/31/2016 at 9:55 am):
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2016/10/lp-org-unveils-site-redesign/#comment-1464759
Stewart Flood and I programmed up a few scripts to scrape a list of all Google search links to LP.org pages, then checked each of those URLs for 404 errors.
We discovered 83% data loss.
Those findings were emailed to Kevin Ludlow and to the LNC.
Seperately I sent the LNC an email with additional thoughts on these issues.
Neither have been posted to the business list (so far, at least). If anyone wants a copy, please let me know.
Andy,
The LNC put Ludlow in charge of site redevelopment and budgeted $10k for it (source: Minutes of the February 21, 2016 meeting of the LNC).
Whether more has since been budgeted, I don’t know.
Of course, just because $10k was budgeted, that doesn’t mean it was spent. Maybe Ludlow got the new site for $10. Even at that it would have been a bad deal, though.
The new site works much better on mobile devices than the previous one. To me, it looks very similar to the DNC website. 10K or so(or even more) is about right for a nontrivial wordpress CMS site if extensive organizational content migration is involved in the contract(which may or may not be that easy). The theme is not store bought…it is custom created by Zocalo Design.
On this matter, I have to disagree w/ Knapp. Yes, I have no doubt that many could build a wordpress cms using a template store for a 100 bucks that meets their own approval. But you are not the client. And for any nontrivial organization, there tends to be lots of decisions makers w/ a multi-phase workflow, with each step requiring approval. In my years, I have yet to run into any that will simply fork over X dollars w/ the only stipulation being: surprise us!
I didn’t even know there was a link there at all. Probably something that the software does when you upload a picture and insert it into the post. No need to be sorry though, it was a valid question 🙂
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to criticize. I thought it was a coding error that caused the hyperlink attached to the picture with the post to go to the picture of the LP.org website instead of going to the real LP.org website.
The URL has not changed, it’s still LP.org
The candidate pledges thing at the bottom is a disaster, with a bunch of anti-/non-libertarian policy positions.
There’s a big difference between getting rid of licensing and making it voluntary, or making government pensions voluntarily financed vs. getting rid of them/micromanagement.
It reads like a conservative grab-bag, not a Libertarian approach.
Not to mention the enormous work now for state/local parties whose links just went bye-bye. And a lot of stuff is missing.
Whenever we make progress, you can expect the conservatarian mafia in the LP to decide to re-do the website, platform, hide materials, waste money or some other silly scheme that gets zip people in office.
How come there isn’t a link to the new LP.org website in an post about the new LP.org website?
The logo thing was a big waste of time. All of that debate over the new logo, and then money spent on switching it, and it has not resulted in even one new party member, one elected Libertarian, or any tangible gain for the party.
It is a shame that the LNC wastes so much time and resources on things that are not productive for the party or the cause.
I really don’t understand any of the stuff the LP has done in the last year or so. The new logo, the new website… all of these changes must have been fairly expensive and are all worse than the things they replaced.
Tom, I was chastised on here a few months ago for repeating the $20,000 figure for the website, which I had been told by 3 or 4 other people. So I would like to get documentation as to what the exact cost for the website was.
I agree that the new site is a disappointment. The old site was better, in my opinion.
Andy,
IIRC, the LNC budgeted low five figures — I think it was $10k but it may have been $20k.
What they got for their money was:
1) Not very competent installation and customization of a $50 WordPress theme; and
2) A little bit of crappy, amateurish new content; and
3) Lots of existing content, developed over a long period and at considerable cost in staff time, etc. missing (hopefully not deleted, hopefully restorable).
I could have given them THAT for $100, including the cost of the cheap generic theme.
Does anyone have verification on how much money the LNC paid for this new website? I skimmed through the FEC reportsreportsdid not find this information, but perhaps it was because it was paid out under some company name of which I was not familiar.
AMcCarrick got this one right.
I am advised that an outside group is preparing a list of the missing pages.
Somebody really doesn’t know webdesign… another nail in the coffin for the LP. How do you not put a single piece of actual useful information “above the fold” on the homepage. The only thing above the fold are a set of rotating nondescript pictures. The overall design is okay (specifically the header and footer), but the content layout of the homepage needs to be completely re-thought; as does the Navigation menu.
In his response to Chuck Moulton’s concerns, Kevin Ludlow writes:
“The old site was very, very bad.”
I stipulate to Mr. Ludlow’s expertise in bad web sites. The new LP web site, as well as the ugly, poorly designed and uninformative web sites he pointed to when agitating for the job of destroying ours, prove that expertise beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Whoever wrote the issues page should have asked for help.
You have to scroll down one more row to get more recent news. Latest News is the section that used to be press releases, below that is Libertarians in the News which is the old LP.org blog.
I liked old format.
Just visited site. Latest news October 13th. 17 days with no news. Great.