Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s presidential exploratory committee has a new site up: explorehuckabee.com Graphically, it’s dark and rather funereal, like John McCain’s. C’mon guys, black is so twenty minutes ago. Speaking of which, the date in the upper left hand corner was five days old when I looked at it (a little Java script please!).

Graphically, there are more problems than color, or the lack thereof. The campaign’s positioning line, "Proven Leadership" fades into the background to where it’s barely legible. A campaign slogan should dominate the layout – otherwise, what’s it doing there at all? His home page photo makes him look way too much like Richard Nixon debating JFK, complete with the Dick Tracy 5 o’clock shadow. Not a particularly pleasing how-do-you-do.

Content-wise, he has a blog, with a couple dozen members signed up. But most of the posts are either from the Governor himself, or Team Huckabee. Still, it’s the beginning of a community, and that’s a good thing.

Major bugaboo: there’s no video on home page – it all links to inside pages – which misses the point that for this type of application: the Internet is increasingly a video-driven platform. The home page should say hello and this is who I am in no less time than it takes to buffer a few seconds of streaming video. You wouldn’t send a wax dummy out on the campaign trail – why use a static page to try to catch someone’s attention?

The inside video content is OK – such as a Meet The Press interview, but frankly, it isn’t nearly as good as Huckabee is on the stump. And (Doh!) part one of his interview with Jon Stewart doesn’t run. Don’t tease the visitor, Governor, it’s very bad form. His links to social sites (myspace, facebook, gather, Yahoo groups, and MSN groups) should also be on his home page. But aren’t.

Which isn’t the biggest gaff on this site, except it’s also a challenge to navigate. There’s no nav-bar on the home page, so users are left to search around for copy links to any actual content, such as white papers, bio, etc. The developer broke a cardinal rule here: always provide at least two separate ways for users to navigate to other parts of the site. Again, baaad.

In terms of search engine optimization, he may as well be peddling his hand-sewn quilts for all the notice this site will get. There are no meta-tags except the home page title: "I like Mike." No site description, no text for robots, and no unique page titles. Without varying page titles, Google reads the whole site as one page, and that won’t get him much in the way of placement.

There are also no ALT tags on his graphics, and as we all know, spiders can't read graphics, only text. Tags are also helpful for non-sighted users – and speaking of Section 508 compliance and optimization – there isn’t any. Not best industry practices, not even worst industry practices.

All in all, a pretty amateurish job. Including lacking the foresight to procure his name’s domain. But, naturally, somebody else did – there’s an anti-Huckabee blog at mikehuckabee.com. Ouch.

Politicians looking for success on the web have more than just a learning curve to overcome – it’s a cultural re-awakening for many. They’ve got to make the move from the political milieu, where it’s who you know, to the Internet, where it’s what you know. And from the looks of this site, Huckabee has a ways to go…