My first assignment for my Writing for the Web class was to critique a website. I’ve encountered my share of difficult websites where I couldn’t find what I was looking for or just plain had no idea of what was on my computer screen. I’ve also browsed sites that we’re supremely composed and catalogued in addition to being aesthetically pleasing. So, when I did finally choose a website to grade, it was the culmination of considerable thought and exploration.
I eventually settled on the website for the London Evening Standard newspaper. The major reason for choosing this particular site was my own background, however unfulfilled or limited, in journalism. Journalism is my major and I’ve already taken several classes towards it, including the current one for which this post is required. Plus, not only do I write for my school paper, but last semester I took an Editing class that dealt precisely with the do’s and dont’s, rights and wrongs in the provision of information through the web and in print. The class also covered document design and copy editing. In other words, my previous education prepared me to critique a news website especially.
Of course, I could have done The New York Times or CNN but I didn’t want the assignment to be too easy or insignificant considering that I visit the NYT website at least a dozen times daily and the CNN website not too many times less. I went through my favorite websites, almost all of which being those of magazines or newspapers. There was Entertainment Weekly, People, Vogue and all its pandemic renditions, GQ and its international offshoots, hip-hop’s XXL, Britain’s The Economist, the sensational New York Post, The London Times, and the Wall Street Journal. All these websites were bordering on fulsome, too well-done honestly, to be critiqued by a second-year naif.
Eventually, my criteria for a possible website came to include “news-based,” “not too popular,” and “foreign” (for added interest). And after learning that Charles Wintour, father of longtime Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and whose demeanor (mordant, brutally honest, and “inscrutable”) I admired, was an editor for the Evening Standard, I said, “Why not?”
Actually doing the assignment was comparatively easy since the class as a whole initially discussed and established standards for evaluation. There were well over half a dozen of those standards and I only used three, quite appropriately I believe. If I’d explored all avenues of criticism, I’d have written six pages perhaps instead the three that were more than enough. I gave the Standard’s website a B+ for “Navigation and Usability,” an A- for “Visual Effectiveness,” and an A for “Ethos and Authorship.” I rendered an A overall. Hopefully, my professor will give me the same appraisal for the assignment.
