For PAC website re-do, Pawlenty taps firm that helped Ron Paul

Tim Pawlenty has tapped the firm that helped Ron Paul rake in cash to redesign his political action committee’s website.

Pawlenty’s PAC, Freedom First, and its website are barely three months old. But a makeover by Terra Eclipse suggests Paul-sized ambitions or better. At The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder writes:

Pawlenty advisers have promised to build a top-notch Internet-based campaign infrastructure. What Pawlenty needs now are supporters to harness, and, with solid social conservative credentials in hand, he’s making a play for the anti-tax, Club for Growth types.

The old site took hits for lack of subtlety (the news feed carried headlines that outed T-Paw as a presidential candidate, a topic he still dances around) and a mountainous landscape that didn’t say “Minnesota.”

The new sites puts its average-Joe testimonials about freedom into an interactive Google Maps format, enlarges and renames the “Freedom Feed,” foregrounds Facebook (15,000 fans), and tacks on other clickable doodads. (The mountains are gone, replaced with a more appropriately horizontal field.)

The new site isn’t static: the main banner rotates between a pitch to help Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate bid in Massachusetts, a stop-spending slogan, and the freedom-quotes map.

It will be interesting to see whether Minnesota realities intrude on Freedom First’s corner of the Internet. Notes Ambinder:

The new website will highlight Pawlenty’s national theme for the first half of 2010: fiscal responsibility and stewardship.  His state needs stewardship: it faces a $1.2 billion budget shortfall and is dealing with a court order to that could turn out his unilateral reallocation of about  $1.8 billion in education funding, forcing school districts to borrow the money.

[Via Polinaut]