5 WordPress Themes for Political Candidates
WordPress is a simple tool used by millions of webmasters. Did you know Google has a whole department dedicated to political adword accounts? We didn’t either until recently.
There are many political candidates using WordPress to manage their online presence. As the United States Presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Howard Dean showed, the web is one of, if not the most important tool for political organizing.
Here are our picks for WordPress themes best suited for political applications. The criteria we used to evaluate themes were:
- Layout – political WordPress themes need to grab visitors’ attention quickly and convert visitors to action-takers.
- Design – political WordPress themes send a message about an individual candidate. They are not just a design, but a brand that must be sold.
- Function – themes should have lots of room for widgets and sidebar content.
- Integration – good political WordPress themes should integrate smoothly with social networking sites, social bookmarking, streaming media, Twitter and similar organizing tools.
- Customizable – no political candidate should use an out-of-the-box theme without customizing it to fit their campaign, their constituency and their message.
Update: Here are some new WordPress Political Themes for 2011. Enjoy!
Politico is a straight WordPress theme that you can customize to add features common on political websites such as donation widgets and signup forms.
The Victory Framework is essentially a theme, with tons of built-in features. It is an out-of-the-box website for political campaigns that only needs basic information to go live. Of course, any candidate would need to make it their own before launching officially. But it includes all the basic functions of a political website.
This is also a highly-evolved WordPress Political Theme. It has built in features underneath a political design. It also boasts contact management features which is a plus for any campaign. Rather than signing people up for email lists, you can turn them into advocates and constituents.
Compositio @ Design Disease – FREE!
Tags: political, politics, Themes
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Comments (34)
Thanks a lot Cyrus for a great post.
The biggest advantage of WordPress is its ease of integration and customization. These two things along with many others have made it the most popular blogging platform in the world.
I’m thinking that Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakle should have had a WordPress site. Seems like she didn’t do a good job getting her message across.
Really awesome wordpress blog you’re running here! I always love finding new and inspiring blogs to help me out with my own blogging, and this really takes the cake.
Thanks for the complement Bonita!
Good timing, it’s election time over here, maybe I’ll offer to design some websites
Very handy.. Thanks
I have actually started to get spam from political candidates. I am sure they are unaware of this tactic but man they need to be careful who they hire for their internet campaigns
Actually, in the political campaign world it isn’t spam. If you provided your email address when you registered to vote it is considered public record and an opt-in to receive political messages via email. Campaigns have tried this to be more relevant to different types of voters and to avoid wasting resources on paper mail which is often ignored and thrown away. Usually a kindly worded email reply will get you taken off the list.
Hi, you’ve pretty amazing post in here. I’m surprise to know that Google spent a lot space for politician. Thanks for sharing this information.
I like the MyStream theme I guess it look very suitable for my web. Thanks.
Interesting post. How did you choose these out of all the millions of themes out there? There is too much choice for my liking.
The Probama theme is really interesting. It looks very political.
The web can greatly help politicians. It is much cheaper and easier to spread the word. Also, it is very effective when you think of campaign strategy.
it’s pleasure too read such valiuable article. I will use WooiTuts @ ThemeForest soon.
thanks!
I highly recommend the Victory framework (victoryframework.com). It’s a new WordPress political theme for candidates that has all the features of a campaign site.
It’s free to try, so check it out. And give us any feedback on what can be improved.
Disclaimer: I’m one of the core developers, so I’m a bit biased.
Hi, Connor,
I checked it out–along with the first 30 minutes of a Google search–and Victory is the only theme, with good functionality, we can possibly afford! I am a volunteer and will see what I can do. Hopefully it will be good and I’ll send you a link! Thanks for free tryout option, Dawn
The design were simple but looks effective.
The election season will soon start in my town and country also. Even though I hate the government and I’ll probably not gonna vote, maybe I can make some money from building websites for local candidates. Nice themes, thanks a lot!
Wow all those themes are just great !
The best (for me) : Win With WordPress
The election season is tarting soon, maybe I’ll be able to get some clientele selling some wordpress sites!
Thanks for these themes.
I think my pick is Politico’s theme. Simple enough for anyone to quickly glean the information and well designed.
Politicans are going to love this. Some amazing set of themes for them and i am sure people will also take some inspiration from it.
I think WordPress continues to prove out that it’s a superior publishing platform due to its flexibility and tools.
Love these political templates — I won’t say which one is my favorite, but you might say it’s on the left
They are really well designed. I do not understand why the dominant color is blue.
Great selection of political-themed WordPress themes. My vote goes to the Victory Framework design. And I think I can actually use the Compositio one for my food-themed blog. Glad it’s free!
WordPress is easy to use for both novice and experienced web masters. I really like the Victory theme. Great post!
the Politico theme looks pretty cool actually, just be careful your site doesn’t end up looking exactly like other candidate’s pages if they’re all using the same theme!
At this point not even a slick social media presence could save Rick Perry’s campaign from himself
Cool selection, perfect for politicians. My favorite is theme Politico it’s Web 2.0-ish!
This WordPress themes are cool! I love wordpress because it provides a variety of customization choices of theme. There are lots and loads of themes you can choose from at WordPress.
What a fantastic resource! Thanks for posting this, I’ve linked to it at my website so my readers can take advantage of these useful themes.
Thanks , i like WooiTuts from ThemeForest. Great Selection !
WordPress is very really handy CMS, thanks for the design and also article…
I think any political theme should have to show a list of donors by default, wouldn’t that be nice. We wouldn’t need to hear their speeches then, we would just look at the list and understand why they are saying what they are saying!
Hi Anderson,
You have a great selection of political WordPress themes. I admire the Victory Framework design, because it’s look and feel is outstanding.
Regards
Amit