Topic: Site Styles and Their Relevance

We set out to establish whether there is any relationship between a Web page's style and the content of the page.

Style is a term that defines: form, colour, composition of text, images, animation, sound and video. It also defines the context of the content.

We started with an expectation of stereotypes:

Academic - informative, text heavy, highbrow.

Entertainment - visually striking, multimedia (use of animation, sound or video)

Arts - original, graphical, stylish

Business - practical, user friendly, thermatic

Information - user friendly, straightforward, high on links

Personal - individualistic, reflecting personality of creator/ ower.

For this research we created two forms.
The first defined the type of site we expected to find in each category.
The second form defined what aspects we were looking for.
We sampled a number of sites in each of the categories and summarized them under the various headings.
A conclusion was then drawn for each category.

Overall, after surveying over 40 sites, we established that our preconceived stereotypes were generally as expected. The exception being the Academic one which tended to be colourful and user friendly. We also concluded that sampling needs to cover more sites to give an accurate picture.

Site styles are also majorly affected by the Web skills of the individual people involved.

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