The hype machine definitely has been working overtime for months and things are only going to intensify over the next week and a half.

The candidates running for various offices are on your TV, your radio and your neighbor’s yard sign. They’re sending things to your mailbox, leaving recorded messages on your answering machine and -- in some cases -- ringing your doorbell to ask you for their vote.

Well, sometimes they ask for your vote. Most of the time, they just list a bunch of reasons why you shouldn’t vote for the other guy.

The candidates are even on the Web, if you know where to look. Since this is an area of expertise for OnMilwaukee.com, we decided to take a critical, technical look at some of the sites used by candidates in some area races. (Each race is listed in alphabetical order, so keep those cries of bias to yourself). We asked our writing staff and technical people to ignore the message and judge the manner in which they are presented.

Feel free to follow the links and judge the sites for yourself. And, don’t forget to vote on Nov. 7.

Gov. Jim Doyle
doylelawton.com: Of the candidate's sites we inspected, Gov. Doyle certainly had the most feature-rich, polished site. It also loaded pretty quickly. Built using a combination of static and dynamic pages (with JSP and CSS), it features podcasts and blogs -- both key ways to syndicate his message. His Google-powered search engine seems to actually work, and the secure eCommerce donation tool is (it seems) internally hosted and verified by Thawte. 

On the negative side, the photo gallery is basically useless, including broken links on key pages. And the multimedia section says "Coming soon." Uh, Governor, you're kind of running out of time, aren’t you?

Rep. Mark Green
votemarkgreen.com: The man trying to unseat Doyle breaks a cardinal rule of Web design on usability: plopping a big video (with loud audio) right on his homepage. This not only busts people who are visiting from work, for example (maybe your boss doesn’t want you to be surfing political sites from your cubicle), but for dial-up visitors, it slows things down to a crawl . 

The site is more text-based than Doyle's, and not as polished (note the tacky repeating screen background. (Hey Mark, 1996 called, it wants its Web design back.) This was built using a Windows environment (IIS), but they didn’t bother using meta keywords for search engine placement (then again, if you don't know who's running for governor at this point, it's probably too late).

Green out-sources his eCommerce donation tool, which appears secure but not verified (at least on the originating page). On the upside, Green makes clever use of the Yahoo! Maps API to show his campaign stops, and he has ample working video and podcasts -- but no blogs.

Interestingly, while Green's front page has two pictures of Doyle, the incumbent sticks to the age-old advertising rule of not naming -- in this case, picturing -- your competitor.

UNITED STATES SENATE

Maybe it’s just us, but we wonder how Web savvy Sen. Herb Kohl is. Do you think he knows what Google is or how to add buddies to his MySpace page? It doesn’t matter. He’s going to win by a lot and is probably only started a Web page because everybody else did.

Sen. Herb Kohl
herbkohl.com: This basic site certainly looks like Kohl is running unopposed, though he does use the word "Republican" in his meta keywords. The site, also built in PHP, offers several broken links on its homepage. It has no eCommerce tool whatsoever, which is probably a pretty good indication that he’s not hitting people up for donations, and the HTML is badly formed in many places.

Robert Lorge
law2win.com: This one is the political equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. Even Lorge’s supporters know he has no chance of winning, so they decided to ask for money up front -- as in the front page above the “fold. "

There really is nothing else to say about this atrocious Web site, other than it would've looked bad on a Commodore 64 in 1983.

ATTORNEY GENERAL

Both of these candidates survived hotly contested primaries to make the general election. Both are spending considerable money on radio and TV ads, so the Web seems to be an afterthought.

Kathleen Falk
kathleenfalk.com: This site is totally static, maybe designed in Dreamweaver (if something that good). The graphics are poorly created, and the site utterly lacks any modern applications. She uses a little multimedia, which is good, but there's no search engine or blogs to speak of. She uses a multi-step online donating tool, which is clearly outsourced. It would be shocking if Falk spent much more than a penny to develop this Web site.

One also wonders who Falk is trying to woo by posing with a gun next to a dead deer on the front page. Probably people who wouldn’t vote for her, anyway. That makes you wonder if it’s worth alienating people on her own side.

JB Van Hollen
vanhollenforag.com: This AG site isn't horrible, especially compared to Falk's. Designed -- if you can call it that -- with PHP, it's rather text heavy and doesn't feature any real eCommerce. 

It sprinkles in a little multimedia with its radio spots, and makes liberal use (no pun intended) of tiny photos throughout. In all, it might've looked like a good site in 2000, but its scrolling Javascript ticker at the top isn't turning any heads. In a race that uses very polished TV ads, this site is about a basic as it can be -- without being 100 percent laughable.

WISCONSIN STATE SENATE FIFTH DISTRICT

Both major parties have declared this battle, which is being waged in Wauwatosa and Elm Grove, as critically important and are dumping a lot of money into commercials and mailings.

Apparently, there isn’t much left for Web design.

The Sullivan and Reynolds sites are less attractive than the gubernatorial candidates’ sites. One of our co-workers was so unimpressed that he said "Perhaps the fact that each apparently had their child design and build their site is a way of pushing the candidates' 'family guy' attributes."

Tom Reynolds
tomreynolds2006.com: This site is technically dynamically generated (this time using Cold Fusion) but it sure doesn't look like.  It's incredibly basic and utterly lacking any usable features, but in its 1996-esque minimalist design, at least its not offensively designed.  This eight-page site has one photo.  To call it "blah" would be its greatest compliment. One person in our office said: "This site may have been designed by "Dragnet" detective Joe Friday, because it has a  "Just the facts, ma’am" type of feel. You won’t discover a lot about Reynolds’ personality here, but given some of the media firestorms that he has had to deal with over the past few years, the lack of insight may have been by design.”

Jim Sullivan
Sullivanforsenate.com: It goes downhill in a hurry in this State Senate's campaign site.  Sullivan's photo is blurry, the design is totally amateur, and it was built in PHP (a language with a very low barrier to entry -- which means amateurs can have at it).  Other than a mostly useless event calendar,  this site would've been lame in the '98 election.  For eCommerce, he uses the free PayPal option -- which is akin using a VHS camcorder for a TV spot.