Politics - A Scary Subject

This All-Souls Eve I am working on the most frightening of all subjects ... politics.

The goal of Community Color was to promote locally centric web development. All of the directories had a politics section because that is a part of life.

In the last two years, I've been consumed with the health care debate (to no avail). Anyway, I want to focus on the community sites again.

In the first effort, I started with the local community and worked outward. In this new effort, I want to start with the state and work inward.

I am currently concentrating on three states: Arizona, Colorado and Utah and have three web sites with the URLS ArizonaColor.US, colorado.communitycolor.com and UtahColor.com.

I am working on the politics pages which have the path /dir/politics. They are Arizona Politics, Colorado Politics and Utah Politics.

The state level political directories will have links to state level political parties and statewide political races. The local directories will have links to local political web sites and local political campaigns.

To help tie the local and state directories together, I created a master index. Here is the master index for Utah politics. This page simply has a link to the politics directories in each of the sites.

Prior to this change I was doing silly things for state wide races. If a race had a candidate from Tooele and one from Heber, I would list the Tooele candidate in Tooele and Heber candidate in Heber. This provided no value to people who wanted to compare candidates and it looked like a tacit endorsement.

I confess, a major reason for this change is that I never found a way to monetize local web directories. People are interested in targetting local customers, but they aren't interested in supporting local web sites. The only revenue source I have is affiliate marketing. Most towns don't have enough ecommerce web sites to pay the bill.

When I bump up to the state level, I find that there are enough advertisers. For example, I've found about 100 Colorado shops doing affiliate marketing. The Colorado Shopping directory will have enough affiliate stores to be interesting.

Anyway, I working on political web sites ... it is much scarier than any of the Halloween attractions in town.