It’s October; cold, windy, and an election season in full swing. The streets are plastered with campaign billboards and TV screens buried in candidate ads (I presume; I’m not sure, I don’t watch TV). But more importantly to a web-design nerd like me, each party’s website is up & ready for the campaigning ahead.

Regardless of your opinions on each party’s policy (or lack thereof), it’s just a fact that some of their sites are plainly better than others. With this in mind, I set about ranking the website of each & every party running in the 2026 election, grading each one on Style, Accessibility, and Ease of Navigation.

While I’ve ranked each & every party, this blog post only goes into detail for the 7 parties polling to win seats (and the ALCP, because I found it funny).

8) Legalise Cannabis:

★ 1/10

The ALCP site is anything but boring. The continual torrent of terrible design decisions somehow coalesces to make something entirely & wholy attention grabbing. Upon loading, the site immediately blasts you with a horrible, pixelated, AI-generated image featuring a loving family tending to their field of weed. Sitting atop the image, you’ll find paragraphs of links and text, rendered nearly impossible to read due to horrible contrast.

To give credit to the ALCP, they clearly practice what they preach; you’d have to be off your mind high to create something as tragic as this. The site’s text alternates between large and small, and images appear with no rhyme or reason. Nothing here makes sense, nothing matches, and none of it is particularly good. It is a genuine contender for the worst website I’ve ever seen, and that’s not a low bar.

7) Te Pati Maori:

★ 3/10

Upon first inspection, TPM’s website looks stunning; one of the few that feels truly professionally made. The homepage’s hero image featuring all 7 candidates is beautiful, with deep reds and blacks making their high-resolution portraits really pop and directing attention the tagline: ‘CANDIDATE VOTE MAORI’.

And then, unfortunately, you scroll and find the ugly truth. Whatever designer TPM hired for their hero clearly never finished the job, as the rest of the site consists of plain text centred on a white background with a few poorly designed elements scattered between. Browsing the site feels more like reading a gym’s Ts&Cs than an inspiring political message.

Whatever consolation it is, beyond the beautiful hero image, the site does feel cohesive & easy enough to navigate (even if reading can be a chore).

6) NZ First:

★ 4/10

Browsing NZF’s website feels like an exercise in archaeology. You get the feeling that, thousands of years ago (perhaps when Winston Peters was merely 102 & dinosaurs roamed the earth?), a competent, well-designed site was developed. You can find hints of it from the well-designed footer, to the logical navbar, to the bespoke triple-chevron motif.

But clearly, sometime in the preceding years after the developers stepped away, something went terribly wrong. Perhaps a staffer replaced a button here, or tweaked an image there. Maybe a new segment was needed, or a page altered. What’s clear is that years of minor tweaks and changes by people who didn’t know what they were doing added up to an utterly incoherent site.

On the homepage alone I counted 5 different button designs; some red, some blue, some yellow, none matching. Images are blurry, whitespace is terrible, and there’s a random slider button on the static hero. None of the site fits itself, and much of it is quite terrible.

5) ACT:

★ 5/10

You can really see ACT’s libertarian sensibilities shine through on their website. Each & every component expresses its own right to free expression, changing & doing whatever it wants with no consideration for the collective page.

The navbar is clear, with pink buttons. Unless you click on it; then it decides it wants to be white. On hover, buttons may turn blue or pink or yellow. Sometimes the images in ‘Our People’ are square, sometimes they’re rectangular. Do these images fit? Absolutely not, but it is their right to express themselves however they wish. It is also, it turns out, the right of the website to break entirely. When tabbing through clickable items, the entire page may sometimes disappear as the selection leaves the screen!

All that being said, the core design for ACT’s site is very, overwhelmingly, fine. It gestures at modern design trends, and actually delivers on a couple of them. While it messes up details like contrast, it’s hard to say that on a basic level the site is bad. But conversely, you can’t quite say it’s good either.

4) Labour:

★ 5/10

This election Labour has been criticised for running a ‘small-target’ campaign, doing so few interesting things that people give them their vote out of sheer boredom. Unfortunately, I can confirm this strategy has carried over to their website.

With a dated design, slightly pixelated images, strange fade-in effects while scrolling, and a colour scheme so red a bull may simply give up, the most interesting thing about Labour’s website is that it’s not very good; but I don’t think it wants to be.

3) National:

★ 6/10

If I had to use two words to describe National’s website, they would be “Nice Try”. They very clearly have hired a professional team of designers and developers who have produced a perfectly cromulent site. Sure, some of the images are blurry, and some of the additions like a progress bar as you scroll are straight up weird, but at its core the site is consistent & modern.

But consistent & modern isn’t enough to top this list. The site lacks je ne sais quoi; it’s bland, corporate, and certainly doesn’t get me excited to vote.

2) Opportunity:

★ 8/10

I wouldn’t be shocked if you told me that Opportunity designed their website by showing a developer National’s and saying “do better”. A lot of the core design decisions are similar; early 2020s style floating elements neatly spaced & organised. But where National said good enough, TOP looked to do more.

And where others may fall apart as you dive deeper, TOP’s good design stretches further. In particular, I found their policy pages very well designed; instead of overwhelming the reader with walls of text, clean bullet points & FAQ sections get the key details out. If you want to read more, you can simply download the full PDF.

Each page is full of visually interesting & cohesive elements, from the choice & variation in colour to the swooping arcs that subtly change the background behind videos. TOP’s website feels designed to get your attention, and through its design really does make you feel like you can ‘EXPECT BETTER’. It feels fun, modern, and positive; values which cleanly map to the party’s brand.

1) Greens:

★ 9/10

Last but not least, it’s got to be the Greens. Beautiful, intentional, and expertly crafted, almost no aspects of the website feel like they weren’t deeply considered. While I’ve lauded others for ‘managing’ to not have blurry pictures, the Greens are the first to have gone further & applied grain to their photos intentionally, giving a very retro-future aesthetic which carries over across the site into elements like the very-square UI. It doesn’t go over my head that this aesthetic, which has gained popularity in recent years, is very ‘in’ with young people — a core Green demographic.

Whoever selected the images for the site has done an amazing job. From the homepage through the rest of the site, I often found myself marvelling at the beauty of Aotearoa’s nature captured in their images, nudging the reader towards their conservation efforts.

And it’s not all aesthetics; the navbar in particular stands out as a really clean piece of web design. Rather than dropdowns appearing on hover, subelements fan out after the parent is clicked into a large navigation panel. Not only does this provide easy access to key areas of the site, but it reduces the amount of fiddling sometimes required to move your mouse between hovered elements.

Of all the sites ranked today, the Green’s is the first I feel genuinely inspired by as someone who dabbles in web design. I’m sure I’ll use some of the concepts & styles it demonstrates in future work.

Final Rankings & Notes

Filling in the rest of the parties, we get this final ranking;

A special shoutout to the Animal Justice Party, which despite being a very minor player, has managed to put together an incredibly competent (if plain) website that gets very few things wrong.

AI usage

Two parties stood out to me while working on this list: Alliance and Free Palestine. Both of these parties very obviously used AI to generate (at least large chunks) of their websites. Additionally, Labour also very obviously used AI to generate some text on some of their policy pages.

This is certainly an interesting development in NZ politics. AI code generation could play a role for minor parties in closing the gap with larger, more funded competitors. However, especially for parties with younger or more populist supporters (which tend to skew more anti-AI), parties should be careful not to tarnish their image.

During the writing of this blog post, Alliance updated their homepage to remove some of the more obvious tells (such as this very poorly generated ‘RNZ’ logo (left), which was updated to be correct (right)).