Thursday, January 14, 2010

Sites to Behold

You heard it here first. The Internets are taking Lake County by storm. It was only yesterday it seems, that no one in the County had a computer. If anyone did, they were not online. And of the few that were online, they were dialing into AOL or Juno. Well those bygone days are a thing of the past! Nowadays your neighbor is fiber-wired into an OC3 hook-up for FWDing the kitten & polar bear jpegs to the grandkids.

Some forward thinking political minds see this as an opportunity to turn Lake County's sudden inter-connectivity into election-day votes. At least, that's the gist of this Daily Herald story from a couple of weeks ago ...
a year after Obama's historic election, candidates across the country - and throughout the Chicago suburbs - are using his high-tech model as a blueprint for their own political bids.
Candidates flock to social media to connect, influence
The Herald profiles State Senate hopeful Suzi Schmidt as one candidate seeking to leverage all the new media into political advantage. As Schmidt explains her web presence ...
There are a lot of ways to campaign, and this is just another mechanism.
The Herald story posts an image of Schmidt and her website:
Of course winning a election is not simply a matter of throwing together a website, count 3-2-1, and then good times! According to the Herald ...
"You can't just take a boilerplate (Web site) and run with it," said Bruce Newman, a DePaul University professor who specializes in political marketing and advertising. "It has to be integrated into the whole (mission) of the campaign."
The Herald fails to mention anything about boilerplate blogs, of which your LakeCountyEye will assume requires no explanation. But boilerplate websites are not hard to find either. For instance, local politician Suzi Schmidt has a webpage for her State Senate campaign ...

www.suzischmidt.com
And Schmidt's webpage is nearly indistinguishable from fellow State Senate candidate Dale Righter's webpage ...

www.righterforillinois.com
As fine an example of boilerplatedness as anyone could hope to see, in your LakeCountyEye's opinion. Now your LakeCountyEye does not know for sure who churned that particular generic page for Schmidt, but has a hunch it was someone working in the basement/recroom of the Illinois Republican State Senate Campaign Committee ...

www.ilsenategop.com
Well, your LakeCountyEye has more than just a hunch. A quick WHOIS on all three websites ...
www.suzischmidt.com
www.righterforillinois.com
www.ilsenategop.com
reveals the identity of their registrant:
Registrant:
Republican State Senate Campaign Committee
PO Box 3422
Springfield, Illinois 62708
United States
A heads-up to LakeCountyEye operatives -- suggestions on how Schmidt might improve her website can be forwarded to ...
Administrative Contact:
Cudney, Ryan rcudney@ilsenategop.com
Republican State Senate Campaign Committee
PO Box 3422
Springfield, Illinois 62708
United States
(217) 787-7550

Technical Contact:
Cudney, Ryan rcudney@ilsenategop.com
Republican State Senate Campaign Committee
PO Box 3422
Springfield, Illinois 62708
United States
(217) 787-7550
And as a bonus, your LakeCountyEye found another webpage registered to the Republican State Senate Campaign Committee ...

www.davidluechtefeld.com
Website coming soon. So true, so true.

This glimpse at an actual boilerplate webpage in incubation is a rare opportunity to observe how websites like these slowly emerge from the EtherNets and into our basement/recrooms. Kind of like gazing through the heavens at proto-galaxies in formation ...
... through the Hubble telescope.

9 comments:

Team America said...

Come, come, Barney. I've never excoriated Blue Lake Special for trying to emulate the look and feel of Team America down to the last pixel. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

Barney Baxter said...

hi TA,

I think I did mention that boilerplate blogs require no further explanation.

-BB-

Anonymous said...

Gee, TA, the look of you blog, perhaps. But that's not surprising as you used the set template available to anyone. As to the 'feel'? I don't know about that. Not many folks are standing in line waiting to emulate.......

Wretched!

Sophistic!

Myopic!

I'm sure our readers can add a few more choice words to describe the 'feel' of Team America. Let's hear 'em.

Barney Baxter said...

Let's play nice, everyone.
-BB-

Nicki said...

As a political website designer myself, Barney, this one really made me smile. These boilerplate sites can really be an embarrassment to a candidate (although somehow I doubt Suzi Schmidt will be much affected by your revelations).

Barney Baxter said...

hi Nikki,

This must be your busy-season then.

I suspect that the first time Schmidt saw her website was when she posed for the Herald photo. Also satirical blogs never get no respect, so I also doubt anything said here will have much affect either.

-BB-

Crazy4glf said...

TA,
No one wrote a periodical article extolling the virtues and platitudes of the Lake County Eye or TA blogs.
They are singling-out one person who - in my humble opinion - is not the most web-savy candidate in the region.
Also, to be honest, significant funds were spent by said candidate vis-a-vis her role as a public official on a County multi-media campaign with little apparent regard for tax-payer fund$.

It makes me wonder about the 'issues' some in our region pursue and the issues some in our region over-look.

IllinoisJim said...

Looks OK to me. But something is missing. Flags. During W, didn’t all GOP politicians wear flags, lapel pin flags; flags often as big as Mr. Romney’s 3 by 5 size lapel flag? Ms Bachmann might say this was to signify the real Americans. Its good to be out of that decade

Anonymous said...

Here is a Suzi Schmidt web site that is certainly not boilerplate. It looks like some star struck Tea Bagger put it together in a basement. It could be that or Suzi Schmidt and her minions read the Eye and took matters into their own hands.