Preparing Content For Your Political Campaign Website

Campaign Website Content Screen Before your website is even designed, you should plot out what content will go into the site. Website content will include basically two things – text and images. If you have already created advertising materials, they can be worked into the content. Otherwise, well-written web content can often be incorporated into offline advertising to ensure a consistent message. When writing your website copy, it’s a good idea to save the page separately or to combine them into one file with each page content separated and marked off. These are your general pages that will require content.

Home Page Text: The home page text should change often, but to start, you may want to create a ‘letter to voters’ announcing your campaign, why you are running and what you hope to accomplish if you win. In time, you can update this text to include new developments or to shift your focus from awareness to support-gathering.
About the Candidate: Start off with some personal information, such as family, time lived in the area, hobbies, ect. Then take your resume and work it into a short biography. Keep it short and bullet-pointed, but don’t simply make it a list of your work history. Work a few words about what you did in those positions. Electing someone is more than just whether are qualified – voters need to like you, as well.
Issues: This is the heart of your website content, and the most unique content you will create. Stake your positions against those of your opponent. Where necessary, break tissues into separate pages.
Endorsements: Include organizations and direct quotes, where possible. Endorsements can be added throughout your site, particularly where they are relevant to a particlar issue.
Voter Registration Information:
Finally, work and rework your initial text to make your content as readable as possible .

Images

Include at least one good head shot for the home page. If running for office, you might want to use a flag as a backdrop.
Include images of recognizable landmarks, particularly if your issues touch on those areas.
Use photos from public or campaign events throughout your site. Where possible, try to include captions explaining the event.
When using photos for endorsements, it’s a good idea to ask for permission first.
Make sure your images are optimized for the web, so they load quickly and still look good.
For both onlne and offline advertising, when sending images to a designer, larger, higher-resolution photos are best. The designer will be able to resize and cut down the size of the images. In other words, they can optimize a good-resolution image down, but they can’t make a poor resolution image look better .

Having this information pre-written will make your website creation go smoother. Nothing looks more unprofessional than pages that say ‘coming soon’. We recommend that Online Candidate clients begin work on their website content as soon as their domain is set up – even if they are not going to go ‘live’ with the site for some time. This provides plenty of time for tweaking elements so that when it does go live, the site is as effective as it can possibly be.

This article was an excerpt from Running for Office as an Online Candidate, an e-book included FREE with any Online Candidate hosting package.

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