Venice on the web
A semi-regular column

Finally, the web becomes a player in local elections
The good news: more city candidates than ever before are hitting the web; the bad news: with just more than 100 days left until the election, most sites are still in development
-- John Patten, 07/15/04
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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We have webbage, repeat, we have webbage
Last year, only one city council candidate, Vicki Taylor, had a candidacy web site. That made Taylor the second pol in city history to use the web to further her candidacy. Her site is still up, by the way. The credit for the first council candidacy web site goes to Jim Leis in 2002. Leis ran against John Moore.

So that's two -- two -- candidacy web sites in the history of Venice politics.

This year's candidacy web sites already outnumber the combined total of all previous city politics web sites. Mike Gelormino and Gary Anderson already have their sites up and in development. Both are still in their crude phases, with Gelormino promising to "yada, yada, yada" for the voters. That's kind of funny, but it is very typical of web development process -- throw some text, any text, onto the screen just to see how the layout works, then come back later and put in the real text.

Every year for the past three or four years, Venice Florida! dot com has had an open offer to all city candidates -- free FrontPage hosting. So far, only mayoral candidate Gary Anderson has taken us up on the offer, but the offer is open to any and all candidates.

So here's the political web sites as we know them so far:

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.