How easy I wondered is it to find the 2010 election manifestos of the UK’s three main political parties via their respective websites?

Search results

To keep things consistent I used the same search wording each time PARTY NAME party manifesto 2010. So how easy was it?

Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats did quite well in the search. For the Conservatives the top result was a link to their website – a good start.

At the time of writing, the Liberal Democrats had released their manifesto only a few hours before. So the fact that fourth result was a link to the manifesto page was impressive. The first two results were news site stories from that day, and the third result a link to an old news story page on their website concerning the manifesto. Top marks.

The Labour party placed a distant third. The third search result was a link to the Conservative party website (highlighted), with the first link to Labour’s site in 7th. Since the Labour site was the only one which did not have a ‘manifesto’ page, I assume this must be negatively affecting the search result.

Websites

Moving on to the sites themselves. The Liberal Democrats are clear winners. The splash page for their site features a nice big ‘view manifesto’ button.

The site home page features two prominent manifesto banners.

While the actual manifesto page offers iPhone and Blackberry apps, web pages for each chapter and video clips,  in addition to a download for the actual manifesto. Great to see so many means of delivery being explored.

The Conservative’s search result was for the home page of their site, towards the top right corner of the page there is a link to the manifesto which is pretty easy to spot.

The manifesto page itself features a couple areas with links to the actual document as well as audio files or each chapter.

The ease of locating the the labour party’s manifesto depends entirely on the route taken. The search result link leads to a splash page on which there is a prominent ‘download the manifesto’ button. No problem here.

Trying to find the manifesto via the main website is however a different story. Having scanned the home page for a manifesto button, I looked in the ‘our policies’ section, where one might reasonably expect to find the manifesto. I read through the extensive collection of links at the foot of the page before looking around in several less obvious locations. Finally, I returned to the home page where I found, in the ‘other news’ section, ¬†a link (highlighted) to a news story announcing the manifesto. This page contains a ¬†link to the manifesto. Dare I say ‘must try harder’?

In conclusion

Before starting this exercise, carrying out search engine optimisation for the launch of an election manifesto wouldn’t have seemed an obvious necessity. Having seen the Conservative website rank above that of Labour in the Labour manifesto search result, I fully see the importance. Never in doubt in my mind was the requirement that the ease ¬†of finding the manifesto on the website should be of the up most importance. So top marks for ease of location go to the Lib’ Dem’s, and to Labour too but only via their splash page. Back of the class for Labour for no button on the site home page and no actual ‘manifesto’ page.

Tags:

• User experience