Far too many Lib Dem Constituency branches are dependent on the ‘Build Your Own Cookie Cutter LD Site’ package made by Prater Raines. It seems extremely popular amongst Consituency Branches, but for the life of me I can’t understand why.

Stuart Sharpe accidently stumbled across one of these sites looking for his local Lib Dem Party and was crushingly disappointed by what he found. 

The message is simple: This is worse than doing nothing online at all. 

From a design and technology point of view, these sites are woefully out of date and very ’Web 1.0′ – no user generated content, no interactivity – just flat, boring info dump (and sometimes not even that – they don’t even keep them up to date properly)

Where’s the big call to action to get people’s email addresses? Where’s the links to their Facebook profile, or their Twitter feed? Where’s the blog? Where’s the Flikr gallery that shows before and after photographs? Where’s the Youtube channel?

Being ‘online’ isn’t just about having a website. It’s about using whatever means open to you to communicate and engage with whoever wants to listen. The benefits are simple: People who seek you out on the internet are going to be a lot more open to you than people who’ve had a Focus leaflet shoved through their door.  Recruitment, fundraising… these are all things made easier by giving people a no-committment way of engaging with you, getting used to you and – if you’re doing it right – be impressed by you.

Remember, people are looking at your online activity to discover what they think about you. They’re also finding out what you think about them.

Consider: Top story on Derby’s website: Public Toilets, posted 15th of December, 2008.  What that says is the Derby thinks that people who look at their website aren’t remotely important, and they couldn’t care less. That’s what it says. What is a visitor, like Stuart Sharpe, who might be open to voting Lib Dem in that constituency as an ‘anti Labour’ vote supposed to think? He’s going to (and did) think that the Derby Lib Dems were a bunch of idiots.

It’s not good enough.

Training for good use of online activity should be something every PPC should get. They should also be given help, and resouces and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD will SOMEONE please buy Cowley Street a Wordpress MU setup with a standardised Template for Lib Dem Constituency Branches and fund a techie to run it and make central funding of election campaigns dependent on having someone keep their online activities up to date and fresh. 

Prater Raines either needs to improve their game or they need some serious competition, because at this point many of these cookie-cutter sites are doing more harm than good.