Dino Rossi, a familiar candidate running to be the state of Washington's next Governor, has launched a new site for his campaign at DinoRossi.com.

Dino is a solid Republican with a great opportunity. I am hopeful that this blog post helps his campaign (and gives you a few ideas for your next campaign website).

Let's dig in (feel free to weigh in on the site in the comments)...

(Note: I have a MacBook Pro and I view the sites in Firefox, Camino and Safari. My viewing experience is probably a bit different than yours depending on your browser, screen resolution, etc. Deal.)

The Good
* As soon as I pop the page, my eyes are immediately pulled to three important action-items on the site: "Donate," "Donate," and "Donate." That's probably a good thing if you're the fundraiser. Smart use of the color red on a dark site.

* The strongest feature on DinoRossi.com is his smart use of web-video. On the homepage, you see a few staged questions under "Man on the Street." Unfortunately, every question is compiled in to one long video so even if you could care less about the question/answer, you're forced to listen/watch or leave. However, Dino's answers are great and he's easy to watch on video so I'd expect this to improve over time. It looks like Dino is going to expand this to a micro-site, "Tell Dino." Of note, Dino has good some good messaging on that page. Stay tuned for more.

* Also, I like Dino's IssueTubes, where there is a video about him talking about the issues under each tab. My biggest complaint is that the videos seem to be using a custom flash player instead of something like YouTube. "Hey, hey, ho, ho, your command-and-control has got to go."

* Lots of syndication options. Content can go anywhere and Dino gets that.

The Bad
* Where is the Queen? As I like to say, if content is King than data is Queen. When you visit DinoRossi.com, you are not greeted warmly with a splash page and there isn't much attention being paid to collecting emails/data on the websites. This is perhaps the biggest flaw of the site as Dino will truly need a "movement" to win his race and emails mean the ability to syndicate his message and financial supporters.

* Newsletter Sign-Up is Broken. Three times I tried to sign-up for email updates for Dino Rossi. I used three different emails, @davidallgroup.com, @slatecard.com, and @gmail.com. Every single time, I received the following error message: "Sorry, sending the email to request your confirmation failed, please click "Reload" to try again. If it still does not work, it may be because you are listed on our "Black List", which means that you cannot receive emails from our newsletter system. In that case, please contact the administrator." Obviously, this is a fatal flaw.

* Wasted real estate. Dino is a real estate guy so he should get this. In the world of preview panes, it matters what you put above the fold. I've re-sized my Firefox browser to 1024x768 in this image (click to enlarge). As you can see, there's nothing but static content -- CHANGE. I think Dino should dump the flash image and push everything up a bit, but hey, that's just me.

* No blog. Need I say more?

* Give me pretty URLs. It's a simple re-writing mechanism to change ugly URLs to more intuitive URLS. For example, this is the URL for Dino's "About" section:
http://www.dinorossi.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=4&Itemid=26.

* Issues. I'd like to see more issues -- particularly some of the "Long Tail" issues that he can articulate his stance on - for free - through the Internet.

CONCLUSION
All-in-all, Dino's site is a strong step in the right direction. It's open-source and has most of the ingredients to making an effective campaign hub. Room for improvement? Absolutely, but we're getting there.

What do you think?