The URL election.co.uk was used for Business Geographics’ coverage of the UK General Election in 1997.
Built by a core team of just a handful of people our coverage of events, angled substantially towards an explicitly geographical perspective, garnered millions of hits. The website featured:
- Clickable image maps from UK to constituency levels.
- Town to constituency search facilities.
- Interactive zoomable maps with the MapGuide plugin.
- Maps in Virtual Reality Markup Language format.
- Geographical organisation of content, e.g., by counties.
Adrian wrote about the design of the website for the Association of Geographic Information 1997 Conference, at which it won a prize for Technological Progress.
Later, others (Mahoney & McLaren, 1999) commented on the relevance of the site as part of the use of spatial data to enhance the democratic process.
The Election 1997 website was highly influential, effectively setting the pattern for most major online coverage of elections throughout the world!
The contributing team had another crack of the whip for Blair’s re-election contest in the UK General Election of 2001. By this time most, including Adrian, had left Business Geographics to form Lead Hat Limited but the [geo]electoral news formula continued to carry over.