Website Analysis

English 3120 Assignment

Overview
For this assignment, you will pick a website of your choice and analyze how its design utilizes (or fails to utilize) effective rhetorical principles in accomplishing its intended purposes.

Pick a website 
Although you may pick any website for this analysis, you might want to keep the following considerations in mind:

  • The site you pick should be of mediocre to decent quality. Avoid those websites that could make the “Websites that suck” list. 
  • Avoid websites that are too extensive. For example, it would probably be impossible for you to analyze the entire website of CNN. If you really like a certain website that’s big (has a lot of links and pages), what you could do is to focus on one section of the website. Ideally, you want to pick a website that has only a few pages, e.g., somebody’s online portfolio.
  • The site you pick shouldn’t be too old. A site that has not been updated for ten years may not be the best candidate for this assignment. Ideally, the site has been updated within the last 12 months.
  • The site should be balanced in the amount of text vs. graphics, with neither too much text nor too many graphics.

Analyze the context for the website
Consider the site’s intended audiences, intended purposes, platform, technology used, constraints, and special considerations. Ask some basic questions:

  • Who owns the website?
  • Who is the intended audience of the website?
  • What purposes do you think the website intended to accomplish?

Analyze to what extent the website is or is not effective
Do some research about effective website design and consider some common aspects:

  • content design (appropriate content? proper amount of information? understandable language? good writing)
  • navigation (easy to navigate? good visual hierarchy for the links? informative link text?)
  • use of graphics (are graphics well designed? are they meaningfully related to the text? are they effectively used? are they appropriate? are they of good quality?)
  • page layout (are different elements on the page logically laid out? are text and graphics placed at appropriate positions considering their relationships? is there a good balance between white space and text? are different textual elements properly formatted for visual hierarchy? does the formatting, for example, indicate clearly the different levels of headings?)
  • typography (is the typeface, font size, or style appropriate?)
  • use of color (is the document too plain in color or too colorful? is the use of colors justified? does the color serve the content and the purpose of the document?)

At the same time, do some research about the organization, business, or individual that owns the website. Have a good understanding of the needs of the business/organization/individual and the purposes of the website. Based on your knowledge of the intended purposes of this particular website and your knowledge of effective web design in general, provide an objective analysis of what aspects of the website were designed effectively and what aspects could be improved..

Your Analysis
Your analysis should contain at least the following components:

  • An overview of your report
  • Background information about the organization/business/individual this website is designed for
  • A brief description of the website: its content, its intended audience, and its intended purposes
  • Analysis of the design (the actual analysis could be organized in different ways, whichever you think would be most effective)
    • What seems to work well and why?
    • What could be improved and why?

Posting Your Analysis
Post your analysis on the Website Analysis page you created.

Technicality
Your analysis should be 500-1000 words.