Florida Democratic Party

Designing a Site to Show a Bright Path Forward for Florida

As the progressive voice in a diverse and populous state, the Florida Democrats' task is to engage voters to take action on policy related to social justice, the environment, ethics, and education reform. Doing that requires effectively tipping casual, thoughtful supporters into active, working participants so it helps that they have a modern, unique, and responsive web site designed to connect easily with citizens and voters that loads fast and is easy to use and update.

Beyond informing voters about goings-on throughout the state, the Florida Dems site focuses on the concrete steps to take action, such as signing up for news, registering to vote, or volunteering one's time. NMC has a lot of experience cultivating "The Ladder of Engagement" through our other political website design work, and the emphasis on engagement is evident from start to finish, from the news article-based home page to the prominent calls to action throughout.

Energizing and Engaging Voters

Like all NMC projects, first and foremost we identified the objectives of the organization as translated into the actions most people visit the site for. To design effective web sites, it’s essential to organize the navigation and layout around what people are there to do: in this case, to Contribute, Register to Vote, and to Volunteer. Together with a form for joining the FDP mailing list, these core actions — and the custom icons we illustrated for them — constitute the calls to action that immediately engage the visitor on the home page.

We leveraged strong fonts, bright colors, and custom iconography to connote energy and action to visitors.  They immediately get drawn into the site through the design.  The emphasis on calls to action throughout reinforce the focus of the site and make it easy for visitors to convert on any page, leveling up casual visitors to strong advocates.

Scaling Over Time

NMC has now worked with the Party through multiple election cycles, helping them to continue refine the site aesthetically and keep it in line with best practices.  The site has been able to scale and grow due to the upfront planning and its strong CMS platform, which allows the Party to create a large amount of content and design changes to be layered on top without interfering with the site's functionality or adminstrators' control.  It has been a rewarding partnership that has led to NMC working with many other candidates, including statewide, congressional, and local around the state.