CaspioVote is being marketed as an easy-to-use election guide type drill-down, database driven tool for media companies to plug-in to their sites and have an insta-election guide.
I’ve read all pages of the site related to this particular application, and visited the only live client page I was able to find through their press release and have given my opinions, good and bad about the information that’s currently available on this just-released system.
Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
Pros:
- It’s turnkey, pay the money and it’s an instant election guide
- No coding or other knowledge needed other than sticking a a code-snippit into your existing site
- Relatively inexpensive, which it typically the case with turnkey solutions.
- No additional staffing needed
Cons:
- It’s turnkey, this means you have little control because all the work has been done for you.
- It’s does not appear to be search engine friendly, not having a URL hierarchy is going to limit if not exclude you from the free traffic that your news organization will get because of the lack of search engine friendliness.
- No additional staffing needed, this is a great solution when you’ve got a one or two person web crew in your newsrooms and neither of which is a database or web application developer.
Some other thoughts – Here the CaspioVote Features page and my response to those items, the Features page has the bulk of the public information about the application which is why I’ve concentrated on the details provided there.
- Fully-hosted and operated by Caspio, requiring no support from IT.
- They have control over your site, if their servers crash or the software breaks, you’ve got to wait for them to fix the issue, much like if you use GoogleDocs instead of MS Office, it’s great until Google’s servers go down for a few minutes and you haven’t saved what you’re working on. You’re completely at the mercy and experience of the Caspio staff and their datacenter (having not seen a license agreement for the application, is there an SLA to provide accountability and retribution for extended down-time?)
- Seamlessly integrates with your site.
- By seamless, they mean they give you a snippit of code that happens to be a javascript call to display the information, this method isn’t search engine friendly, and tends to have difficulties in cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility.
- Covers all race levels (local, county, state and federal) and ballot issues.
- This hierarchy should be easy enough for basic web users to understand and use. Does it provide enough flexibility for those who want more information and detail?
- Visitors see local election details and candidate profiles on your site and print their customized ballot
- Print their custom ballot as seen on the only live-site sample running this application is simply a button that prints the web page that they’re on, complete with the original site navigation, images, and the Caspio frame.
- No limits on the number of counties, state and federal districts, townships, parishes, municipalities, or school districts.
- Well I would hope there wouldn’t be!
- Unlimited page views included in the annual license.
- This is only important because each time someone visits your election guide, it’s really their website that’s coming up inside yours, frankly, it’s not unlimited, what they have is tiered pricing based on your market-size, having a bigger market means you’re likely to have more web views, which in fact makes the price higher. So yes it’s unlimited page views, but at the same time, you’re still paying more for your size. This does seem to be a fair way of pricing and is quite common when working with media companies.
- Mass-email feature to help you invite candidates to complete their profiles and answer your questions
- You’d still have to have the email addresses of those candidates to email and enter them into this application, so is this really a time-saver?
- No interference with your advertising and analytics systems so you enjoy all the traffic and ad revenues.
- It seems like this could be problematic depending on how they have the site implemented within your own.
If I were an Internet person with a limited budget at a newsroom that wouldn’t otherwise have a very comprehensive election guide of information on their site without this application, then I would be very interested in what CaspioVote has to offer.
If a newsroom were to buy into the CaspioVote program, they are getting what appears to be a basic content manager of information directly related to a specific election. I’m basing my review on the only live example site available at the time of this posting.
Caspio provides a great entry into the very basic information that every news organization should have on the web anyway, however it is greatly restricted in functionality and usability because of the single- form of navigation and the limited information provided on each page as shown by the live site using the application. The literature available on the web says that they can implement extended functionality for a fee.
On the same front as usability and functionality, by looking at how the page loads and how the hierarchy is built, I would imagine that this setup would not be very ‘functional’ for those viewers who have disabilities and use software and other assistive devices.
For one, screen readers don’t always pick up on those java calls at all, I’m not an accessibility expert by any means, but I do hear complaints from people trying to use the web with assistive technologies and struggling so I’m curious to see what testing has been completed.
There’s my first impressions of the application, what are yours? Comments are open below.
[EDIT 1- added bullets to make the post easier to read]
[EDIT 2- Edited for grammar]
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