Web Marketing for Your Small Business
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
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.
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.