An Ohio Republican candidate for Congress won by a narrow margin today, despite the fact that the district favoured Bush with 64% of the votes cast less than a year ago.

Jean Schmidt eked out a three-per-cent margin over Democrat Paul Hackett, who recently returned from a tour of duty with the Marines in Iraq and who called the President a “chicken hawk S.O.B.”

Let me put that another way. Bush’s popularity has declined so swiftly that a man who attacked the President as a “chicken hawk S.O.B.” can still come within three points of winning in a heavily Republican district.

The last thing Bush wants at this point is to be slapped with the lethal “lame duck” label… so let’s hand the man another possible explanation for Schmidt’s poor showing: Schmidt’s poor web site.

Just off the top of my head:

• There is nothing engaging at all about the site, which is entirely focused on her rather than on the visitor (and voter).
• The front page is devoid of a meaningful message.
• The donate/volunteer link is buried with nine other navigation links.
• You can’t contribute a dime online.
• The gigantic self-aggrandizing picture doesn’t have an “alt” tag (a simple courtesy to the visually-impaired, as well as some of her district’s dial-up users).
• The TV ads are captioned “.WMV format”, a cryptic (except to geeks) way of saying Windows Media Player. There’s no indication of what the message of each ad is, so the sites passes up the chance to communicate with any visitors who don’t want to download more than half a megabyte of data.

(Please – let’s make this an open-source web autopsy. Feel free to add your own egregious example in the comments.)

Compare and contrast with her opponent’s site, which is busy and won’t win any beauty contests, but come on.

Seriously: Scott McLellan should get up in front of the press corps tomorrow morning and say, “It wasn’t W. It was WWW.” Two clicks, and most reporters just might buy it.