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McCain Website Gaffes

Jonathan Hochman on June 11, 2008 at 2:25 pm

I spotted an interesting story on Talking Points Memo about how John McCain had a menu item “Golf Gear” on his campaign website. My first thought was that this must have been clever hacker trying to make McCain look like an elitist. But no, the McCain campaign earnestly thinks golf gear is that important to America’s future.

To make matters much worse, McCain’s home page layout completely breaks when Javascript is disabled, placing the golf gear tab dead nuts at the page’s focal point. McCain’s menus also fail, which probably does not help the search rankings of his inner pages. Those who heard my spiel at SMX Advanced Developer Day know that I browse with Firefox and the NoScript add-on for the sake of security, and to help identify usability problems with websites.

Barak Obama’s webmaster seems to have done better. Obama’s home page is fully functional with scripts disabled. Even the pop up menus work, because they’re driven by CSS.

Only about 2% of desktop users browse the web with scripts disabled, but these users often have a larger than average voice on the Internet. For instance, Googlebot ignores most scripts.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Jonathan Hochman

Jonathan Hochman is the founder of Hochman Consultants and executive director of SEMNE. A Yale University graduate with two degrees in computer science, he has 25 years experience as a business development, marketing and technology consultant.