The Stevenson Villager is a student and professor run publication that reports on things happening on and around campus. Most of the articles on the site are composed and edited by students giving them a professional experience and the opportunity to write articles for a publication. Thus giving them the tools to succeed if they choose to follow a journalistic career path. However, this being a publication with primarily student writers, there are mistakes and instances where The Villager lacks as an overall publication.
Modes and Affordances
Linguistic… The use of language on the Stevenson Villager is simple to understand and read. The word choice for titles is often simple however the font choice does not always work since the publication has a white interface. There are also some grammatical errors within some of the articles on the site, these errors aren’t all that bad but for being a professional esque publication it’s important for The Villager to attend to these.
Visual… The layout of the site is simple and straightforward, there aren’t many crazy or unique visuals; just the logo and articles. With this lack of visuals there is also a lack of general color on the site. The logo is green and each article has a color photo and that’s it. If the site utilized more appealing colors and visuals it would be much more popular and attractive, especially for younger audiences. However, the use of the photos within articles is simple and doesn’t interfere with the reading, painting a useful image in your head.
Aural… There is a lack of any type of music or sound on the website. However, there’s some videos and interviews on the site. But being an online student publication it isn’t entirely necessary to include videos as the site focuses primarily on the writing aspect of journalism.
Spatial… The front page of the publication is simple and provides access to all parts of the site at the top. This allows you to navigate with ease along with a search bar you can easily type a name or keyword to find a specific article. However, many of the stories are presented in a weird manner that makes the site hard to use and hard to follow and keep yourself up to date.
Gestural… The Villager lack’s gestures on their site. The only gestures on the site is the interactive slide on the menu where users can choose and slide between different articles.
Conclusion… Overall, for a student run publication Stevenson’s Villager is a site that provides students, staff, and prospective students the opportunity to read about events and articles pertaining to the University. However, being a non professional publication the site is lacking in many areas and has room to improve interactivity and its overall appearance. If Stevenson were to improve The Villagers weaknesses the site and publication would be much better and have more readers.
The authors thesis was clear as well as being debatable. He laid out some of the facts regarding the publishing as well as giving his own opinion at the end on what it might be lacking or places where mistakes may have been made.
The author analyzed all five modes of the website and gave a clear description of the evidence of where each mode was represented. Even though some modes were lacking in the website, there was still a description of what was missing as well as what the publishing did have.
The author did not identify any of the affordances.
The author did not provide any screenshots relative to the evidence provided.