A tour of more than 100 Web site home pages yields interesting observations as Election Day moves forward.
Here are some of the things that caught my eye and attention around noon, hours before the first polls were scheduled to close. Most of these pages are changing throughout the day.
- A number of sites are promoting their efforts to deliver news and information outside their own Web pages (or even in the next day’s the newspaper). Some examples include The Seattle Times, which has the Twitter’s bluebird of tweets. My San Antonio also has a Twitter feed and MSNBC has a page full of widgets to download and a nice countdown clock.
- A The New York Times feature asks readers to pick the word that best describes their mood. It was good to see something a little lighthearted.
- As expected, a number of sites offered voters a chance to share their experiences. While some sites didn’t push this option, the News & Observer did a good job highlighting its “problem voting” forums and phone number.
- Few sites had maps on their homepages keyed to the closing time of polls around the country, which I found surprising. CNN’s map made it easy to see which state results will be first. The Argus Leader was prepared with a top of page map that will display who won which state.
- Timestamps help keep track of when updates are filed and Delaware Online does a good job bringing their updates to the top of the page. It is a page that looks ready for a big visual splash later in the night. The Kansas City Star page has a very long list of voter updates, again all of these posts are nicely time stamped.
- Visuals matter with the election story and, as I have written earlier on Poynter Online, many sites seem trapped by their content management system’s template design. Some visual standouts include the Denver Post, the Washington Times and Des Moines Register.
Overseas, the U.S. presidential campaign has generated intense interest in Africa, especially in Kenya, the homeland of Sen. Obama’s late father.
The Standard, one of Kenya’s leading daily newspapers, has maintained an Obama Watch on its Web site. Tuesday afternoon’s lead headline on The Standard‘s homepage, “Obama supporters declare ‘landslide victory,’ ” linked to a story describing a mock election in the Kisumu, the capital of the senator’s ancestral home province.
The Telegraph of London also reported on the scene in Kisumu.
Elsewhere in the world, some of the coverage addressed the man leaving office. “Eight years of hell are over,” proclaimed a headline in the English language edition of Russia’s Pravda.
Many newspapers outside the U.S. kept the focus on events in their own countries. Top stories on the Ho Chi Minh Globe’s Web site, for example, reported the latest developments in ongoing floods that have killed more than 100 people in China and Vietnam, where McCain spent more than five years as a prisoner of war.
