It’s a little early for the average voter, but I’m already thinking about November. See?
I built special election pages for each of the cities having municipal elections this year, with a particular focus on contested mayoral races. The blogs are fed by tags specific for election season. So, for example, every story about the Springfield election is aptly tagged “springfield-election” and is piped into the blog, on top of the regular city page and news index.
Each election page has a custom sidebar with a “Meet the Candidates” module providing some quick background on the mayoral candidates, including links to their websites, social networking profiles and their topics page on our site, which is itself fed by a “candidate-name” tag.
The idea is to have layered context, to let the reader narrow down content based on their level of interest, from city → election → individual candidate.
Going forward, I’m hoping to build on the success I had last November incorporating user-submitted questions into a live debate format. There are some more ideas we’re kicking around with The Republican that aren’t quite ready for prime time, but I’ll be sharing successes and failures as we try to think differently about local election coverage on the Web.
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