Calgary Municipal Elections

The results are in and I am happy to congratulate Mayor Dave Bronconnier on his third term as our Mayor. I had time to review the candidates websites before I went to vote last night and discovered a wide range of build quality between the nine sites.

Dave Bronconnier - A beautiful site, well built including video and audio clips of the Mayor's position on issues. By far the best site of all the candidates, complete with proper Meta tags. Dave won the race with 61.06% of the vote

Alnoor Kassam - Also a very well built site, however the Meta tags used include stop words and do not align with the text content of the page. Alnoor lost the election with 16.88% of the vote.

David Bertram - This site was thrown together in 5 mins, or so it looks. I would say it is tough to be taken seriously with a site like this. No title, or Meta tags on this single page site. David lost with only 2.62% of the vote

Elizabeth Fielding - Low build quality. She included some good information on her mandate and position on the pressing issues, how ever this does not look like a serious website of someone who wants to run our city. Elizabeth lost with 1.91% of the vote

Al Foster - This site is basically a blog setup with next to no Meta info. Again a low quality build, but has some good content on his mandate and positions. Al lost with 3.07% of the vote

Harry Heck - A decent looking site, but has and error in the Title field and no Meta tags. He has included a good amount of content about himself, but comes only as a semi-serious candidate. Harry lost with 1.82% of the vote

Sandy Jenkins - Another good looking site, that is not optimized for search. I could not get his inner pages to load. Sandy lost with 7.87% of the vote.

JJ Sunstrum - A home made site, with not meta info. It seems his goal is to raise issues in the election, not necessarily to win the election. JJ lost with 0.86% of the vote

Jeremy Zhao - The best of the homemade sites. Jeremy has built and maintaned the site himself, and has done a decent job with video and audio clips to download. How ever he has blank meta fields in each page. Jeremy lost with 3.9% of the vote putting him in 4th place over all. Well Done Jeremy!

Of the nine sites one Dave's was really built and optimized for search. This corresponds with what I see on a daily basis with business websites as well, appox. only 1 out of 10 will be SEO compliant and built well. What is interesting when I look at the election results is the quality of the website directly relates to the %of the vote each candidate captured. I believe the moral of the story is "If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well".

For more information refer to the Wikipedia page on the Calgary Municipal Election.