The Importance Of Preparing A Web Page

Have you ever clicked on a dead link? Have you ever noticed five or more grammatical errors on a “well-known” website? If you answered yes to the questions, you have encountered some of the things that will contribute to the death of a webpage. Just recently I have come to realize that there is a criterion with four guidelines to follow in order to spot a good website. The four guidelines are: design, readability, navigation, and reliability. The website I have chosen to evaluate is the Elgin Daily Herald. From the moment, the page loaded I instantly knew the criteria for design would not receive a low score for design. The design of a webpage is like a stamp on an envelope, it is sort of a trademark. The design helps the user decided if they want to continue on the website or not. If a user clicks on a webpage that has a boring design, he or she won’t stay no matter how valuable the information is. Elgin Daily Herald is a good example of how not to design a webpage. The first thing that catches your eye are the dull colors, a website should have bright colors that attract users and keeps them coming back. The design of the web page is boring because there are multiple, dull colored boxes scattered everywhere. The background is distracting from the information that the page offers due to the fact the background color is brighter and the logo is more interesting. There are at least five advertisements presented on the website from top to bottom, which is extremely annoying. If you on click on a link to read an article the advertisements will become pop-ups and interfere with your reading. The organization of the page is quite terrible; it almost seems as if the designers did not believe in space. The only page with a good design is the About Us/ Help page. Towards the end of the page there are too many things going on at once and everything is so close together that it …show more content…
The readability of the Elgin Daily Herald is good. There are small pictures underneath captions therefore, it doesn’t take long to load the page. The bigger the images, the longer it takes a page to load. Everything is spelled correctly. The color and size of the text is standard. The title size is great; however, it would not do them any harm to up the size just a notch. The sentence structure and wording is easy to understand. Unfortunately, they do not have the option to translate the website in more than one language available, it is English …show more content…
The reliability of a website basically means how trustworthy the website is. Can you trust the information along with the sources? Does the website have any well-known, credible authors? Elgin Daily Herald is reliable. The Daily Herald is a well-known newspaper, nationwide. Therefore, the company has reputation to keep, which is why they would higher credible authors. The authors are credible because they present you with the facts, evidence, and the author’s opinion. There is contact information, a submission box, and links to their social media accounts listed on every webpage. Elgin Daily Herald is also dependent on feedback from its audience. There are many things in the online newspaper that is dedicated for the readers’ feedback. On every page there is contact information, a submission box, and links to all of their social media