Peter Grandstaff

Web Marketing for Your Small Business

Obama is President Elect Website Roundup

Well, moments after I posted my last entry everybody declared Obama the winner.  Looks like I need some more practice with the whole live blogging thing, but tonight was a fun start.

I took screenshots of many many major news websites’ front pages, interesting to see that the NY Times changed their headline after about five minutes.  That’s one of the great things about publishing on the internet.  You can make a change instantly.

North Carolina still can’t be called, but Obama leads by a fraction of a percent.  Indiana is the other really close one.  Figures, the Grandstaff side of my family lives in Indiana, and my folks and I live in North Carolina.

It is always exciting to see Democracy in action, and the world wide web has brought us a lot of amazing technologies to watch it all unfold.  Stay tuned and I’ll post some screen shots with web design critiques in the next few days.

Now it’s time for me to watch an episode of something funny over on Hulu.com and retire for the night.

Latest Election Website News

I neglected to mention last time that guardian.co.uk formats their summary graphs in a very attractive way.  All the US websites seem to be a horizontal bar with the win point of 270 electoral votes marked at center.  The Guardian is using circular, or arcing bar graphs for electoral votes and popular vote.

a good example of displaying data on a website

a good example of displaying data on a website

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Some Website Diamonds in the Rough – Election Update

Google is doing a nice job.  A clean clear interface with graphs and tallies in the right sidebar and breaking news stories in the center of the page.  Google seems a little less conservative with their projections than others, I’ll stick with the New York Times for numbers I can trust.

Over in the UK The Guardian has something I haven’t seen elsewhere.  There is a tab on their map that lets you see a map where each state is drawn such that its area is proportionate to the number of electoral votes it represents, very cool.  Additionally they offer three shades of coloring on the map to indicate varying degrees of leads in addition to wins.  Very nice web design and programming!

Current NY Times count, Obama: 159 electoral votes and McCain 49.  Google and The Guardian agree on 202 for Obama and 80 for McCain.  Blue is up 3 seats in both the house and senate.

Congrats to Fox News, their online map now shows color on states, but just one shade.   Strange thing is that they are showing zero electoral votes for either candidate.  Looks like they should put some more money and talent into their web development team.

Election Update & Website Roundup

Since my last post, Obama has climbed to 118 electoral votes while McCain is only up to 17.  Obama took New York and Maine while McCain picked up Alabama.  I’m using the New York Times website for my numbers here.  Google is saying Obama: 195, McCain 70.

I’ve got to start off by giving kudos to Fox News for having the most useless election coverage I’ve found so far.  As is customary they give a US map, but where you expect to see color coding based on current reporting there is but one color to the whole nation.  You have to move your mouse over a state to see the results.

So far I think I’m most impressed with the NY Times site, you get great color coding of states and counties with light coloring indicating a lead and dark coloring indicating a “victory.”  Of course, these are victories being called by the news media based on the polling results as they trickle in.  The NY Times site also gives you all the local info you could want by letting you zoom in to state level.  This is a great example of a quality web application.

Covering the Web Coverage of the Election

I remember the first election that I followed the results of entirely online. It was the 2000 election. CNN was so bogged down with traffic that it took minutes for the page to load. I was using a T1 connection, so I had no shortage of bandwidth.

Tonight, there are a wide variety of very high tech approaches to covering the election on the web. I’ll be posting as I come across things as I work here in my Situation Room. I’ve got two computers running three monitors all displaying something different. At the moment, I have the New York Times on my secondary monitor. I’m surfing on my primary monitor, and I’m using my laptop to blog here.

At the moment, Obama has 87 electoral votes to McCain’s 8. The democrats have gained a seat in the House, and three in the Senate.

Here in North Carolina it looks like Kay Hagan has beaten out the incumbent Elizabeth Dole. In my district David Price has beaten Lawson. The North Carolina gubernatorial race is still too close to call, but Bev Perdue has a slight lead.

Here’s the nicest looking widget I’ve found so far for those of you keeping score at home:

Where does Google come up with all these ideas?

Google has grown from a web search engine into a massive provider of web services and applications.  You can use Google to keep track of your calender, search a gigantic archive of video (growing at the rate of 13 hours video per minute,) use email, work with spreadsheets, presentations, documents, and even get satellite photos of most of the planet all from one site.

I started using Google as my primary search engine early on.  It was still in the beta testing phase.  You’ll notice some Google features have a ‘beta’ indicator in the upper left by their logo.  This means they are not considered a final product, or release quality, yet.  Final testing is being carried out to work out the last of the bugs.  All quality software products, and web applications go through this process.

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