Someone please check my grammer of my report thanks

REPORT

Investigate the Newscientist Webpage



From : Kheng Siong Teoh October 20, 2005

To : The Newscientist webpage owner

Subject: STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF THE WEBPAGE AND POSSIBLE

IMPROVEMENT



In this report I present the information about the strength and weakness of the webpage. In general, it seems that this webpage had an excellent layout but there were several improvements could be made to enhance the usability of the webpage. Besides identified the strengths and weaknesses of the webpage, I also provided several ways that were able to enhance the performance of the webpage.



I obtained the information given below from some webpage users. Besides this, several techniques in the textbook were also being used to analysis the webpage to ensure the quality of my report. The things that I focused on my analysis were the main objective of the website, accessibility, attractiveness, current, accuracy and ethics. In addition, I also used the four basic design principles to evaluate the layout of the webpage.



Advantages and Disadvantages for that the information being present.



After I analysis of the webpage, I found that there were several advantages and disadvantages in the webpage that could affect the quality of the webpage.



Advantages



This webpage had several advantages that enable the user to search for the information that they needed easily. For example, the used of main menu in the upper part of the webpage helped the users to navigate through the webpage easily. Besides this,

It also had the three click function which allowed the users to locate the information that they required not more then three clicks. This could reduce the time that the users needed to spend while they were looking for a particular article. In addition, the used of search function in the webpage enabled the users to perform keyword search could increase the usability of the webpage. With this function, webpage users could locate the information they needed without spending a great amount of time looking through the webpage. Furthermore the webpage was able to support by multiple platforms and web browsers this enabled the users to browse through the webpage without changing the setting of their computer. This made the webpage became user friendly. Due to this the webpage users were able to access it with any computer that they could access. The webpage also provided the most current and accurate information which ensured that the users could get the most updated news and data that they needed for their research purpose.









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Disadvantages



The main problem in this webpage was lacked of visual aid which made the webpage became less attractive. The lacked of visual aid could reduce the effectiveness of the webpage to communicate with the users. This could cause the users to get ambiguous information from the webpage. The second problem that I found in the webpage was the absented of audio support that reduced the accessibility of the seeing impaired to the information that was published in this webpage. The last problem that I found in this webpage was the information only published in English which could reduce the usability of the webpage to the non-English speaker. Although English is an International language, not all nations in this world were using English as theire first language. For example, In Japan there were only a small fraction of people knew English well.



The possible improvement for the information being present



There were several improvement could make to improve the usability and accessibility of the website. The improvement techniques that I presented below were obtained from the webpage development handbook.



Improvements



In order to make the webpage became more attractive, some visual aid such as picture or animation could be used. When picture or animation was being used make sure that it aligned with the text information besides this, the picture and animation that presented in the page should be correlated with the text information. In addition, the font size should be increase to ensure that it was large enough for legibility. The second improvement that I suggested was included some audio function that able to help seeing impaired to navigate through the webpage. For example, the web publisher should include the function that enabled the users to browse through the webpage by using microphone. Furthermore, the information in the webpage should transform into audio version which could help the users to access the information through earphone or speaker.

In order to suite the needed of different users, the webpage should be able to support for multiple languages. Due to this, an additional drop box could place at the top right or left corner of the webpage which enabled the users to customize the language of the webpage that suited them the best.





Layout evaluation based on four basic design principals



In general, this webpage had an excellent layout which enabled the users to identify the important links easily. Besides the layout, I did my analysis based on the basic design principles and found that the page designer did a good job for implementing them. Based

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on my analysis, I found that the page designer did a good job for proximity which he tried to place the related information as close as possible to enhance the communication ability of the webpage. Besides proximity, the webpage also had a good contrast between the text and the background which made the text easy to be read. For example, the used of white background with a blue and black color text could enhance the readability of the text. Besides colors, the font size that used by the designer also showed a good contrast between the links and the explanation. In the page, it had a bigger font size for the links and a smaller font size for the explanation which helped the user to identify the links easily. The typeface that used in this website was Time New Roman which enabled the users to read through the information easily. The designer also used repetition in the webpage to unify his designed. The used of repetition in this webpage could notice by the uniform font size, font color and font style that used by the webpage designer.



Conclusion



In conclusion, my investigation indicated that the webpage had an excellent layout but some improvements were needed to enhance the usability of the webpage. For example, the webpage should design to suit the needed of a wide variety of users and if possible tried to include some visual aid that could increase the usability of the webpage.