Alberto's Second Discourse Analysis

The website I’m analyzing is the website of the local company that runs the Head Start program in our area. First glimpse at the website, I got a sense of professionalism. When you first visit the website the first thing you notice is the soundless animation that is playing talking about the benefits of Head Start to children and the broad pool of people who are in head start. 

  Looking at the screen itself on the home page there’s not a lot of text compared to the other pages on the website. And by text, I mean text, things you can highlight. There’s text in the animation and that text in the animation is consistent for its individual parts. The text in the animation seems more playful. The remaining text on the home page is also consistent but utilizes a different font from the animation. This looks more of the font utilized with a cooperation/organization. The text is also left-aligned. For the text on the homepage, I think the text should be more in cooperated into the animation. The animation itself takes about half the page, and then below that are some pictures, and then the text. I think the author using the animated text was a good idea but it hurt the text below talking about the mission and the history of the organization. 

  Looking the text on the other pages it’s pretty consistent with the other pages. Headings are bolded with all caps. All the text including the headings utilizes the same type of font and all the text are left alignment. The texts below are the headings are in the shape of short paragraphs with usually double spaced in between each paragraph. I noticed when the page uses bullets, the bullets are arrows and the following text is in blue. When I first saw this I thought it was a hyperlink for information about the subject, but it wasn’t. But the blue text does make the bullets stand out. For the audiences that this organization works with and for, the font type and how they use their text is appropriate since they are informing whoever is reading this website. 

 Looking at the connection between the pages they are pretty consistent. They utilize the same similar shape, same font, it’s pretty consistent. There is also a toolbar that is the navigation bar that is always shown on all of the pages. Within that navigation bar there are links with links, a dropdown menu for some of the categories. When you click one of those sub-links, and look back at the navigation bar there is a marker telling you what pages you visited. This is extremely useful especially since there may be a lot of information to ingest and sometimes you needed to go back and look at information again.  Whoever created these pages probably create the homepage from scratch and then used a template for the rest of the pages. That is usually typical of any organization or company it looks professional.