ANALYSIS OF A WEBSITE: "THE GUARDIAN"

G – WEB PAGE

R – FORMAL

A – PUBLIC

M – MULTIMEDIAL

P – TRANSACTIONAL: INFORM AND ENTERTAIN

S – VARIOUS TOPICS

Affordances:

The website is really interactive: the user can obtain data or commands and the page gives immediate results or updated information.

The Guardian gives you the possibility of becoming a member for free, or, if you are already a member, you can sign up for commenting the news and interact with the website.

You can choose the news you prefer by clicking on the article you are interested in. Doing this will allow you to read the full text. You can also search for a particular article by typing the title or the name of the journalist on the search bar.

On the top of the page, there is a bar with multiple buttons. Those are the categories of the news. The reader can choose the topic he prefers by clicking the correspondent button. There is a quite large range of topics: UK, world, politics, sport, football, opinions, culture, business, lifestyle, fashion, environment, tech, travel. These are in order of relevance o the bar. There are other buttons on the top of the page, as “jobs”, “dating” and “more”.

The “Headlines” gives information about the date, the temperature and the weather of the city from where the website is opened.

Discouise features:

The website is revised very frequently, in order to guarantee an efficient service, and new articles are uploaded.

How do the language features and the layout suit the audience?

The audience of the website of The Guardian are newspaper readers. They want to be informed of what’s happening around them, using an instrument that must be safe, correct, well-written, inviting and aesthetically pleasing.

For catching the visitor’s attention the editors of The Guardian have established a hierarchy between the news, giving priority to the more important news and to the ones that are presumed to be more interesting for the readers. That gives to the reader the possibility to choose the topics and the news he prefers.

The register is nearly the same in all the articles: formal. The usage of a high register is good when a journalist has to report an event without supporting any parts.

All the articles are grammatically revised and correct. The syntax is edited with care. That because an article has to be comprehensible, otherwise it will loose reliability.

The titles are really crucial: it is because of them that the reader decides if read the article and stay on the webpage or leave. The guardian uses sentences rich in meaning, but short in words, that sum up the whole article.

Aesthetically speaking, the webpage has to be attractive. The Guardian’s website has a lot of blue hues. Blue is the colour of wisdom, of the truth, of the closeness, of the faith and of the honesty. Blue is gathered with the male gender, so it’s more liked by men. Maybe most of the audience is composed by males.

The images chosen for the articles are selected with care, because they have to be appropriate and with a strong impact on the readers.