New Media

November 14/07

2 Comments

CaspioVote – Turnkey Election Guide – A Review

by Jonathan Coffman on November 14, 2007 · 2 comments

in New Media

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
  • 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]

Related posts:

  1. CaspioVote Post- Additional thoughts
  2. Unified Reporting?
  3. A New Media Mindset

Tagged as: Advertising, Caspio, Content, DS, Email, Google, Ike, images, Internet, Jonathan Coffman, knowledge, Mail, Media, MU, News, newsroom, Organization, print, revenue, Review, Servers, Software Review, support, Testing, Vote, wiki

  • http://www.caspio.com caspio

    -Caspio Response: We have no control over a client’s site,
    only over the application we license for use on a given site. Caspio Bridge
    standard offering is a multi-tenant software-as-a-service. It would take a
    whole lot of redundant server farms to crash to take down our system. All of
    our code and the final applications have gone through code audits, user
    acceptance testing and quality assurance. And we have an industry standard
    Service Level Agreement available to any client who requests such at a 50
    percent premium necessary to provide 24/7/365 technical support.

    Caspio Response: Your experiences are not industry standard.
    We have more than 55,000 databases deployed in over 43 countries with
    monitoring systems in nearly two dozen locations around the world. All of
    our code is tested on various platforms and with a cache of different
    browsers (and versions). If your experiences are different, it’s most likely
    the JavaScript you’re working with isn’t clean (lowercase, combine all
    JavaScript in one tag, etc) and should be subject to some code audit or a
    peer review. Our application is 100 percent xHTML compliant. All the latest
    versions of all major browsers that are on all major platforms are supported
    by our product. We have tested the system extensively on the Windows and Mac
    platforms and with the Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers.

    Caspio Response: There is no “live site available for
    testing” as it won’t be available to clients until December 1. If you know
    and understand how elections work, with respect to districts, seats, races
    that cross one or more geographical boundaries, etc., then it should be no
    surprise that the application is very sophisticated in nature and relies on
    a robust relational database management system to power the software.

    Caspio Response: This is an inaccurate statement and you
    greatly over simplify the programming necessary to accomplish the task. The
    application allows the user to pick and choose which candidates they want to
    vote for and then print a customized ballot that they can take to the polls
    that list those candidates. Our objective was to maintain the site’s
    branding and keep the ads in the print version, so the printed version
    maintains all size content including any ads but it only prints the
    candidates that the user has selected. The customer has the option of
    utilizing their own printer CSS to hide any unwanted element from the print
    version. An add-on option is available to pop-up the ballot on a clean page
    designed specifically for printing.

    Caspio Response: You sort of miss the point on the tiered
    pricing model. Yes, larger clients will have a larger audience and therefore
    more transactions to the database. The tiered pricing allows us to quickly
    scale the application to handle the load of having tens of thousands of web
    hits an hour. This is where our elaborate server farm comes into play. With
    each search is a transaction to our servers, plus inbound and outbound data
    transfer (bandwidth). Think of it like a cell phone plan. Would you expect
    two people to pay the same amount if one person made 100 calls a month and
    the other 5,000? No, because there are fixed costs involved in the
    infrastructure to handle the call volumes regardless of account size, and it
    is equitable to spread out that cost based on anticipated web hits given the
    client’s market size.

    Caspio Response: Absolutely, as each email is customized and
    includes a secure method for the candidate to access the candidate side of
    the application to enter demographic information and respond to customized
    questions. The email process is built right into the workflow of the
    application, as well as the ability to send notifications, reminders, etc.
    Caspio is against SPAM and our Terms of Service requires our customers to
    follow the law.

    Caspio Response: Your statement is unfounded. We have
    thousands of clients, none of which have any issues with Caspio seamlessly
    integrating into their sites. You say it “could be problematic” yet you have
    never has a demo or requested a free trial of our Caspio Bridge platform,
    which is available at http://www.caspio.com/media
    . If the analytics tool is widget-aware it
    will be able to pick up the dynamic content that is served.

    Caspio Response: You sort of miss the point here, too. Size
    of a newsroom has little to do with whether it makes sense to engage in a
    third-party relationship. Businesses make smart financial decisions every
    day for what makes the best sense for their company. Just having someone who
    can develop doesn’t mean they can write code that is scalable on an
    enterprise level. There’s also the processes and infrastructure involved to
    maintain the code and continually grow the application. Let alone the
    hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in primary, secondary and
    redundant server farms to account for disaster recovery. There are also the
    engineers and database administrators who need to keep everything running
    and the web and network administrators who maintain the security of it all.
    In the end, the pricing is spread across our entire client base to make the
    product most affordable for clients in any market size.

    Caspio Response: Thanks for insulting my entire team of
    developers before you’ve ever even seen the product. At least they now know
    your opinion is baseless since you pointed to a similar product that we
    built for one of our clients and not the product we will be releasing on
    December 1.

    Caspio Response: I’m curious to know what functionality and
    usability you thinking we’re lacking?

    Caspio Response: Again, your opinions are baseless because
    you haven’t seen our product, nor are you aware of any of the technologies
    we have to accommodate online viewers with disabilities.

    {Edited Nov. 19- JC}

  • http://www.jonathancoffman.com Jonathan Coffman

    Seeing as this is a a continuing conversation, in and effort at transparency and fairness, I sent a list of direct questions (without the personal commentary and thoughts which is what I post to my blog) to the Caspio folks Thursday morning (prior to their response here). Those have not been answered as of this post, but the personal attacks against me continue. When and if I hear new information I will share it with it you.

    Thank you to those who have emailed your support, it’s unfortunate that this blog post has gotten as much attention as it has and that things have happened the way they have.

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