Dr. Jennifer Hoppe Vipond's website for her 2018 Congressional Campaign
As you may have guessed, vipondforcongress.com was built to help Dr. Vipond tell the residents of Wisconsin's 5th District why she wants to represent them in Congress, and why they should vote for her. But that's not the website's only purpose.
Vipondforcongress.com is an example of how political candidates, elected officials, and government agencies can create an online presence that is informative, well-designed, functional, secure, and accessible to everyone. This can and should be done without spending taxpayer dollars on large, indifferent IT companies or on technologies that are expensive, difficult to set up, or difficult to maintain.
Dr. Vipond's team of independent designers and developers accomplished the goals of vipondforcongress.com using technology that is almost completely free and open source, and they published the source code here on Github for the general public to see and reuse.
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- Mobile-first, mobile-responsive design
- Cross-browser support, including Internet Explorer 11+
- Scores highly on audits for performance, accessibility, and best practices in web design
- Can handle heavy traffic (see Github Pages traffic limits)
- Encrypts and securely transmits form data (for example, credit card details)
- Basic spam prevention measures taken on all forms
- Form responses can be accessed in JSON format
- No library or stylesheet dependencies. Just plain old HTML, SVG, CSS, and Javascript.
- Tracks basic information about site visitors
- Code-free blogging from anywhere
- Plain text and HTML marketing emails
- Open and click tracking on marketing emails
- Unsubscribed and bounced emails are automatically removed from lists
- No fixed costs
- Variable costs only include:
- Domain registration
- Financial transaction fees charged by Stripe and Donorbox
- Email fees charged by Amazon Simple Email Service
The technology stack used to create and maintain Dr. Vipond's digital presence is:
- Atom (text editor)
- HTML, SVG, CSS, and Javascript (layout, graphics, appearance, and interactivity)
- Github (version control)
- Donorbox and Stripe (online donations)
- SimpleForm (forms, including email subscription)
- Jekyll (static site generation)
- Github Pages (hosting)
- Cloudflare (content delivery network and universal SSL)
- Prose.io (content editing)
- Mail for Good (email marketing)
- Google Analytics (website analytics)