Political Web Site Templates

[dthomsen8]

Tomorrow is Primary Election Day in Pennsylvania, and that has me looking at existing political web sites, and now I am investigating political site templates. There seems to be a wide variety of such templates for sale, at widely varying prices and different kinds of complexity.

Rather than follow my examples, you might want to scroll down and answer my question at the end of this posting.

For example, http://www.wyomingwebdesign.com/file.../politics.html has templates at about $60 each, with and without Flash, a deal on some stock photos, and a deal whereby the candidate can buy exclusive rights to a design for $2,100. The same templates are available at many other vendors, where the prices and designs are identical with this example.

As another example, http://www.fpworld.com/why-choose-our-templates.htm wants $197 for their templates, and they claim that theirs are superior quality.

There is another example that I cannot find again just now, which wants $25 a month for the template plus hosting, and asks the user to fill in a lot of information for a form that creates the web site.

In all three of these instances, and others, I find lots of Flash intros and lots of JavaScript, but so far I have not found even one of these sites with a home page that validates at W3C to any standard at all.

Discouraging, because I started out looking into this as an alternative to creating a web site for a candidate from scratch, but maybe that is the best approach. I know that Dennis and others have done political web sites, and other forum members have helped me critique existing ones for me.

Perhaps someone will give me an encouraging word. I would like the site to validate at W3C, avoid Flash, videos and sound (KISS!), and allow plenty of room for content. Any suggestions?