Villager Analysis

We can use a Rhetorical Analysis to assess The Villager. The Villager is Stevenson’s user-friendly website that guides students, parents, alums, professors, and prospects to name a few through the ins and outs of what goes in the Stevenson community.  The site allows users to find the content they are looking for easily and efficiently. Although The Villager is a solid site in its make-up and contents, there are still some modes that the site could use to take it to the next level.

Visual –

Black, Green, and White, though they are great school colors, (Go
Stangs!)can be very bland and boring if consistently used and not used correctly. That is one of our main visual issues. The use of these colors is simple and effective, however, they get old if we don’t add some flair. The use of colors on the website goes from cute school spirit to bland. After a while, it tends to look like a professional website that has not gone through a media change. Along with the colors, the fonts of the headlines and categories/subcategories also scream makeup change. They don’t really grab the attention of the user unless you are genuinely on the website to look for headlines and not just looking at the site miscellaneously(like most people do). Even though these aspects could use some sprucing up, it is also the characteristics that make The Villager easy to navigate.

Linguistic –

The overall language and word choices that the site uses to expand on how I related the website to a professional website. This could be a good and bad thing. It can be positive because it gives the website a lot of respect and things that look professional attract people, however, that being said that professional wording and language are only attractive to s specific audience within our specific audience. The only time you see the language and wording change a little bit is when we have the student-written articles, which is cool of course because we want to hear from the students.

Aural –

This mode is the one section that the site is really missing. The only audio we have is through videos and there aren’t that many videos on the site as a whole. However, along with the lack of videos, there aren’t many audio files either.

Spatial –

The organization of The Villager is probably one of the best aspects of the website. The tabs and headlines are easy to follow and navigate. They guide you to exactly what you’re looking for without going through a maze of clicks. If you would like to restart your search you can easily go back to the home page where you can begin your search and navigation again. The way it is organized you can also easily stiff through old, new, and relatable posts easily.

Gestural –

Along with aural, this is another mode that is kind of absent from The Villager. The only gestures we have on the site are videos and they don’t necessarily count as gestures because the gesture comes with the video, it is not its own entity. The lack of gestures makes the website less interactive than other websites.

The Villager has a lot of attractions that are positive for the site including its easy accessibility and user-friendly organization. It has all the aspects that can attract their audience and slightly intrigue them to want more. However, if the Villager can expand on some of the other modes that they lack in that is what can take them from a boring, cookie-cutter professional site to a fun college website that people want to go on every day.