MA Treasurer Sites, II

I click so you don't have to.

The candidates for MA treasurer/receiver general are still along a spectrum in their campaign sites.

• Steve Grossman was the rabbit in the race, running months before the others. He came with a fully formed site.
• Karyn Polito is tweaking her OK site, though it lacks meaningful content.
• Steve Murphy apparently chose the wrong site designer and has yet to bring his site online.

Grossman is in the fine position of starting with a superior site. It has lots of detailed positions and other info. He has also received a massively high wall of endorsements. It there's anything you want to know about him, it's there. He backs it up with a similarly beefy Facebook page and regular tweets that alternate the political and personal. He stayed ahead as well as starting early.

Polito has made at least one substantial improvement on her site. The vid on the opening page has much better production values than I complained about previously. This version still uses unnecessary, distracting, unrelated background music, like it was done for a wedding. However, the sound is good on this one and it comes in on her rather than making her a swimmer in a wide sea. It also was specific to the race and provides reasons she's running. The secondary video is still lame and her Priorities page remains fluff with no substance. She may expand that when it comes time to debate Grossman and maybe Murphy.

Alas, poor Murphy, I knew him not well...by his inoperative site. Pity. He's a nice guy and has a middle position between Polito's fiscal conservative and Grossman's activist treasurer stances.

His self-announced drop-dead date for the website came and went and went. I've been checking. For weeks, the site had a coming-soon splash only. Then finally in the past week, a marginally functional opening appeared. You could donate or volunteer, but it had no info suggesting why you'd want to do either.

Now, we get the Drupal failure screen. That suggests that someone is actively working on the site, at least. It also educes a bit of empathy. I've planned a huge Drupal site and it can be daunting and time consuming. He and his designer may have been overly ambitious.

Regardless, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, "There is no there there." I'll keep clicking on the sites and hope Murphy is on the net soon. He needs to get 15% of the delegates at the Dem convention next week. A website may not make the difference...yet again it might have.

Saturday Update: Murphy's site is back to a splash that offers donate and volunteer buttons. Those work, as do the links to the Twitter feed and Facebook page. There's no content yet.

Memorial Day Update: Half way there... The Murphy campaign site is partially functional and OK looking. The Issues and News pages have Greeked text instead of real content. The saga continues.

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Tags: massmarrier, elections, Grossman, treasurer, Massachusetts, Polito, Murphy