Texas gubernatorial candidate and current United States Senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison, seems to have hired a rather amateurish firm to make her campaign website.  You’d think that after Obama thrashing McCain in November, Republicans would have finally woken up and realized the importance of the internet.  I guess they still have no idea what they’re doing.  The site can be viewed at the rather strange URL of http://texans.forkay.com/

This blog post I ran across, is a must read and outlines all the no-nos that Kay’s team has committed on the website, including having so many hidden keywords that the site was banned from Google for qualifying as spam.  Apparently the most egregious errors have been fixed since her site first caused an uproar, however there is a lot left to be done.  For instance, the site’s content is in no way optimized to include relevant keywords or topical issues.

The KayTV section has, as expected, a collection of YouTube videos.  However the videos have no titles on them, even when you roll your mouse over the incredibly tiny video thumbnails.  This of course means that you have no idea what the topic is of the video you’re clicking on.  And I’m not going to waste my time clicking through dozens of videos just to find one that relates to an issue I care about.

And of course her “issue statements,” if you can call them that, consist of 5 of the vaguest paragraphs I have ever seen in politics.  It is no wonder she’s dipping so far in the polls; nobody can figure out what she stands for.  Check it out for yourself. But my favorite issue statement is the one for education, which says, “We can achieve this by [...] reducing the number of adults without high school diploma.”  Oops, it looks like their website’s copywriter went to the same school as the writers of the chopstick instructions.

Kay Bailey Hutchison is a sitting US Senator and is running for Governor of Texas.  She obviously has the resources at her disposal to hire a decent web design and SEO firm.  But obviously she just chose a firm within the existing GOP network of lame internet companies, and I’m sure they charged her an obscene amount of money for their second-rate work.

I guess the GOP will never figure out how to use the internet, especially if they keep hiring the same lousy people and firms over and over.  Why stick with the same types of people who have failed the party so many times before?  Not to sound like Obama or anything, but it’s time for change.