New: www.somersetgop.org
September 10, 2007 • (0) Comments
Somerset County’s Republican organization got a shiny new website in time for the 2007 general elections.
http://www.somersetgop.org is a giant leap forward for the organization. The group’s fourth or fifth incarnation on the web, this version integrates current calendar events and weblog-style news features and was intended to be maintainable by volunteers rather than a web professional.
The color scheme is richly textured and evokes tobacco and old leather in a fixed-width layout aimed at trailing-edge viewports and browsers. Photographs are a mix of commissioned work and licensed stock. Of note, a significant hurdle to using commissioned photography of candidates and officials is cropping facial closeups without losing too much of the “story” in a shot. If I could do it over, I’d provide the photographer examples of crops that work for web display and ask him to shoot a few frames that naturally support these uses.
A notable feature includes an image map that links irregular hotspots on a real county map to individual detail pages for 21 municipalities.
The site is built atop ExpressionEngine Core and owes a great deal to a month-long collaboration with SCRO officials, Chris Corsini and Kate Whitman.