Everyone who has to deal with the labour.org.nz site is probably aware of just how naff the thing is. I guess that is what happens when you have the traditionally technophobic like MPs involved in whatever committee makes the site. For a start, they don’t appear to understand the concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

This weekend, my partner asked me about Labour’s Tertiary Education policy. Searches on google turned up press releases, and news articles including the student rags Salient and Critic talking about the policy. It didn’t turn up the actual policy. In fact it took quite some time for me to find the policy (which turned out to be pretty good).

I got it by the dint of saying “site:labour.org.nz tertiary education policy“, in other words by restricting it to the Labour site. This isn’t exactly the easy way that people should be able to access the policies during an election campaign.

I proceeded to moan widely about the technical illiterates from the 20th century running website development at Labour. This had the desired effect. I had someone point me to a page that the Labour campaign has compiled linking to all of the policies. Updated: It turns out that you can find that page easily if you just search for “Labour policy”

Just to be sure that it remains accessible, I’m going to violate copyright and paste it here. We have far better SEO on this site to anything that Labour does. It may help it rise in the google rankings.

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