george galloway dot com

[popinjay]

Anyone else noticed that the official site is an absolute mess? It's about two hundred pages long. It's getting like that clusterbombesque Respect supporters blog.

[Mandy]

[faceless]

I wouldn't say it's about relevance but about overload. When you read a newspaper there are breaks in the layout which structure things and allow the mind to relax and flow...

But personally I've not been that enamoured of having so many news stories on it as I think a personal homepage should be more personal. Was there a mention of Galloway's new baby? There might have been, but it's stories of personal interest like that which I'm sure many visitors would be more interested in.

[nekokate]

Well, I haven't really mentioned this, because I didn't want to come across as someone who is just out to attack Mandy (I had a fairly vicious rant at her a month or so ago) but since Popinjay has brought it up...

Yea, I think Mandy's vision for gg.com is absolutely over the top. It's basically an extended advertisement for her own site, from which every single article is linked. If you doubt this, just scroll down the mammoth index page (if you can even get to the bottom without developing carpal tunnel syndrome) and see how many times you can count the sentence "from SpideredNews.com".

It has absolutely no personal feel to it at all, it's an over-saturated barrage of information.

Having said that, one has to assume that if George didn't like it that way, he would have asked her to change it. So maybe that's what he wants as a homepage.

[faceless]

for someone not wanting to attack you did a pretty good job of it!

Mandy, I suggest you have separate sections, one for general news that might interest people and one (the main page) for Galloway-specific stuff. I'm pretty certain that would get more visitors in the long run...

[Mandy]

Thanks for the feedback.

[nekokate]

[Mandy]

No one mentioned
http://www.myspace.com/georgegalloway

and

http://respectcoalition.org

i.e. lots of sites !!

[nekokate]

[luke]

you do the galloway site and spidered news mandy?!

the galloway site has lots of interesting storys, but like others have said they just need to be laid out a bit better - maybe on the front page have news items relating directly to george and respect, it would give the site a more personal feel, then have maybe at the bottom say the latest ten headlines which you can click on to view the full details - a separate world news page or something would be good, with a new button on the side for it, keep things nicely in there sections. i think it would also be better to not have the page massively long, say ten news items per page or something, then forward / back links through the world news pages. maybe separate the news items into categories, so you could check all the news storys related to latin america, or the israel/palestine conflict, iraq, uk etc - then people can track down easier what it is there looking for, or just go through page by page.

maybe the same for spirednews as well, it is a kinda information overload - there interesting, buts its almost to much, you don't know where to go - and if you was on a slower connection ( not everyone in the world has broadband and i'm sure georges site gets visitors from all over ) those pages would take for ever to load

and just one little thing, when you use the media lens articles, you should really give credit to media lens as well as sayings its on spirednews, i'm sure they'd be chuffed, plus also i think you've missed part of the last alert

[nekokate]

That's another thing! What's this "from SpideredNews.com" business, when every single article from SpideredNews is its self from somewhere else??! Unless you write every article yourself, Mandy.

[luke]

[Mandy]

[Mandy]

[popinjay]

Oops, I didn't know Mandy ran the site. My only problem with it is that it's absolutely massive. That Respect Supporters blog and the official site crashes my browser everytime I open it. Just have a few stories, news or personal. About five is right, I think. How many are on there now? A hundred? More? That's a sure fire way to implode a computer.