Trots op Nederland (Proud of the Netherlands) is a new political movement by Rita Verdonk. Rita Verdonk left the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) and currently holds one seat in the Lower Chamber.
Rita Verdonk left the VVD after disagreement concerning party leadership. At the party congress, members had chosen Mark Rutte as the party leader, but during the 2006 elections, she gained more preferential votes than the number candidate. She called for a party commission to discuss party leadership. Her proposal was rejected, but infighting continued, and after being expelled from her position in the VVD, she resigned as a member, to continue independently.
She has one seat in the Lower Chamber, but various polls suggest that she may take ten seats away from the VVD, and perhaps gain as much as 29 of the 150 seats in total. That makes her a political force to be reckoned with.
Rita Verdonk announced Trots op Nederland on 2007 Oct 17 as a political movement, like the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom), not as a party with members, but a movement with sympathisers.
The official start of the new movement was is today, 2008 Apr 4, with a big party.
This same day, a new web site was introduced a well.
As a rule, Dutch political web sites still show little respect for web
standards, and I wondered how this new site would do.
You’d expect a Dutch political party called Trots op Nederland to use the domain name trotsopnederland.nl, but it does not. That domain was already taken for a possible TV show. The party uses trotsopnederland.com. The domain trotsopnederland.eu has been registered by Arjan van der Veen, who wants Verdonk, former minister of Integration and Immigration, to compensate the increased cost of his wife’s naturalisation.
Even more poignant is that ikbentrotsopnederland.nl redirects to the christian party, because they used "Ik ben trots op Nederland" (I am proud of the Netherlands) as a party slogan before Verdonk decided to use Trots op Nederland as the name for her movement. Additionally, the domain trotsopnederland.tk redirect to the site of the VVD.
The home page has been divided into many parts. It feels a bit like a newspaper, with many small columns.
TON’s site is hardly a web site, but really a JavaScript-site. It demands that you enable JavaScript. The photo feed in the bottom right not part of the site itself, but siphoned of flickr.com and only works if you enable JavaScript.
The site also uses Flash for no apparent reason. There is a "theme meter" that could have been done in HTML, perhaps easiest by using a server-side control. A even more fundamental criticism is that although it apparent that it is meant to measure the hotness of various major themes, it is not clear at all how that is done, or what a number like 0.57 for the education theme means. It is not clear whether these numbers represent anything at all. There is no explanation on the site - perhaps because there is none.
The front page has a rather large picture of Rita Verdonk, in an informal pose. I do not know whether to blame it on PhotoShop, botox or a thick layer of makeup, or use of an old photo, nor do I care, but that photo is misleading. Compare it with photos elsewhere and you cannot fail to notice that she looks years younger than she really is. Not just four or five year younger, but twenty or twenty five years younger. Rita Verdonk was born on 1955 Oct 18. That makes her 52 ½ years old. The site uses a photo that makes her look thirty.
Did her spin doctor suggest she should look her best? Than that spin doctor needs to have his licensed revoked. Rita Verdonk is a politician, not a photo model .Use of that misrepresentative photo sends one clear message to all visitors; Rita can not be trusted to show the truth. Ouch.
The site is unreliable. One moment, you can surf the site, the next moment, the connection is gone. Sometimes you get a page from the hosting company telling you no site has been configured, sometimes you get nothing. It is utterly unreliable.
The site actually validates as XHTML, but not as XHTML 5 or 1.1, only as XHTML 1.0 and the site is not really standard. The pages lack an XML prolog, the site uses the disrecommended "text/html" instead of the recommended "application/xhtml+xml" as its media type, and it does not use the recommended UTF-8, but ISO 8859-1 (ISO Latin-1) as its character set.
That the site validates does not mean that it really respect web standards. It does not abuse tables for layout, but does suffer from serious case of divitus;
<div id="content"> <div id="home_primary"> <div class="morenews"><a href="/index.php?pageID=2" class="morenews">meer artikelen</a></div> <div id="home_primary_wrapper" class="head_left"> <div id="home_primary_headline"> <div class="headline"> <a href="/index.php?pageID=3&messageID=28">
The site has no clear architecture. It does not choose between PHP and JavaScript, but uses both. Use of server-side scripting, such as PHP, makes it possible to keep the client-side clean and do without JavaScript, yet the site relies on it, even for simple mouse-over effects that can and should be done with CSS.
The quality of the JavaScript is not high. I even encountered code for a pop-up window in the JavaScript files. It seems a grab-bag of code plucked from the Internet, combined with code that looks like it was auto-generated by some tool that automatically inserts comments that excel at nothing but needlessly inflating the size of the source (and thus download size and thus hosting charges...) by stating the embarassingly obvious;
'a.status:mouseover' : function(e) { /** * Event: mouseover * Action: display the hyperlinks title in the status bar */ window.status=this.title; return true; }, 'a.status:mouseout' : function(e) { /** * Event: mouseout * Action: clear the status bar */ window.status=''; return true; },
Code like this is a lot clearer (and faster and cheaper) without such misguided comments. Most telling of all is that not one coder one was proud enough to put their name to it.
The site lacks a clear style. The site uses some CSS, but hardly takes advantages of its capabilities. All buttons are fixed-sized image instead of resizable text. The reason behind the lack of a clear house style may the standard CSS style that creators used, which is probably the same for all their clients.
All images are in JPEG and GIF format. These are neither very good formats, nor web standards, merely formats that were supported by browsers before PNG became a web standard.
There is a pull quote on the home page to highlight some of Rita Verdonk’s statements. The page randomly shows one of several one-liners as you refresh the page. That is nice, but it still manages to look rather clumsy, simply because the light grey background of the pull-quote does show an image of a large open quote in the upper left corner, but lacks a matching close quote in the bottom right corner. It is not a dynamically resized open quote, it is a simple fixed-size background image, including a close quote is just a matter of updating that image.
The has five blue buttons stacked on above the other on the top right side. These are image buttons. The buttons are a medium blue with white text on them. If you hover over a button, the button is not highlighted. Instead, the button text makes a jarring movement upwards, to reveal a additional, smaller text below it. That text is a very light blue on light blue in a small cursive font. That makes the text unnecessarily hard to read.
None of this really matters when you consider the beginners blunder the web builders made; the buttons do not work at all until you enable JavaScript; you cannot navigate the site until decrease your browsing security. Apparently, web security is low on TON’s political agenda?
The site does not respond well to text resizing. The theme meter, the blue buttons, the heading, photos and the pull quote do not resize with the rest of the site.
The home page appears to have a link to a web shop, to buy stuff with the part logo on it. Alas, when you follow that link, all you get is a page with a picture of the stuff TON hopes to sell one day. There is no shop. That picture is all there is.
There are perhaps many valid reasons why there is just a picture instead of a web shop, and I have no reason to doubt that the shop will be there before the next elections. But why link to it from the home page when you know there is nothing there? It just gets the visitors hope.
The shop link on the home page promises orange umbrellas, sweaters, footballs and flags with the party logo on it, but the site does not make good on that promise. Promising a web store something and immediately failing to deliver is not just a technical gaffe, it is a political mistake.
The website uses OneStat to track visitors, but does not reveal this in its privacy statement.
There can be no doubt that the biggest blunder of all is the wiki. Verdonk thinks that the site is great way for her sympathisers to talk to her and with each other.
The wiki approach is stunningly ill-advised. You don’t have to be web 2.0 guru to know that Wikipedia’s political pages are prime targets for wiki vandals, a small dose of common sense suffices.
An open wiki for a political
party is not a sign of innovation or openness, but of insufficient sense of reality. Reality is that
a wiki for a political party has to be restricted to registered members whose
identity is known.
Besides, why a wiki for everyone? Wouldn’t it be better
to have a wiki for the party top, and a forum for registered users?
Besides, how believable is the intent to have users drive the politics, when the home page is nothing but Rita Verdonk’s own blog, and not even feature a list of recently updated wiki articles?
The site validates, but not as HTML 5 or XHTML 1.1, merely as XHTML 1.0, and it does not really adhere to web standards. The sites does not use UTF-8, but ISO 8859-1 (ISO Latin-1) as its character set. It suffers from divitus, does not uses standard image formats, relies extensively on JavaScript and hardly takes advantage of CSS. Accessibility is limited, and the site cannot be navigated until you lower browser security by enabling JavaScript.
Although it would not be hard to use the colours of the TON logo as the basis for a distinctive colour scheme, there appears to be hardly any colour scheme at all. Instead, there there are obvious mistakes like very light blue, small cursive text on a light blue background.
The wiki seems ill-advised. Moderating a forum is tough enough already. Perhaps the party wiki will work out right if TON invests in permanent staff to moderate changes - truly permanent staff; at least one has to be awake and alert at any time.
The whole site seems to be an attempt to be web 2.0
for the sake of web 2.0
and as a thin excuse for the phrase politics 2.0
, which apparently means
politics powered by web 2.0 - as if that were something new. Many politicians
are blogging, link to YouTube movies, and various parties have a forum for
discussion. A JavaScript site, a blog, a wiki and few links to Flickr, Facebook,
twitter and YouTube do not politics 2.0 make. The politics remains bound by the
same laws as before. Party 2.0 perhaps, but to make voters believe that Verdonk
believes her own 2.0 talk, she has to walk that talk, and prominently feature
the wiki content on the home page.
The TON site is a portal site like that of many other political parties, with content drawn from various sources such a the blog, the newsletter, press releases, and the (non-existent) shop. Its validation is only skin-deep.
The reachability issues of the site continue to be an issue. The site was unreachable for a while, and as I type this, the site is up, but it is just layout with images, all the text is gone.
My comments about the wiki proved spot on. The site now demands registration and passwords, but even so the wiki is currently an unmanageable mess for of nonsense and irrelevant remarks.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.