Linguistic and graphological strategies on the Web: a genre analysis of two websites

As suggested in the reading "Front-of-house: institutional websites" (taken from "The Language of Websites"), the Web can be metaphorically conceived as a series of "interconnected buildings": users enter this complex as visitors, walk through the reception area (the front-of-house web page) and then go into a maze-like structure, walking through several corridors (hyperlinks), until they find the office that stores information about the topic they are interested in.

The way the different "offices" are placed within the building strictly depends on the way the front part of the website is designed.

The front-of-house web page is the first "text" the user/reader/viewer need to analyse carefully in order to understand what kind of journey he/she might embark on. As far as a web page structure is concerned, there are two websites, among those we saved on del.icio.us, that present a good opportunity to reflect upon the central features that make a website a website.

For example, "Learning vocabulary with games" is characterised by a series of linguistic and graphic devices that immediately generate a sort of map of where the user/visitor can go from this reception area.

Five noun phrases function here as portals to key areas ("Geography Games", "Animal Games", etc.). It is notable that the noun head "Games" is the same in all the phrases and pre-modified by means of another noun. If, on the one hand, the titles of these key areas are constructed according to the principle of "syntactic minimalism", on the other their content is described through complete sentences introduced by the exhortative verb form "Learn", which can be considered the key word of the text.

The constant use of imperative and dynamic verbs creates a sort of hammering rhythm: "Learn...Learn and test...Learn...Improve...and boost...Master...". This verb pattern is also used to express the final exhortation at the bottom of the page: "Click to explore".

One further interesting feature is the use of exclamation marks to express a certain degree of enthusiasm so as to invite people to take part in the game.

Particularly noteworthy is also the pragmatic use of the second person possessive determiner "your"("your brain", "your increased knowledge", etc.), which is used in a generic way: it seems that the creators want to set up a sort of face-to-face interaction with the audience, who might either be made up of casual 'surfers' who are killing time or people who have been looking for precisely this kind of elearning activity.

The use of tenses is a further interesting linguistic point. The present tense used in the concise, but very effective, opening sentence "We make learning fun" signals a sort of "timelessness", or rather a fact, a permanent characteristic of the website. The creators' aim is twofold: help people to learn vocabulary and amuse them. Significantly, they also use the future form "will" ("Our learning game will give your brain a workout!", etc.), which, in this case, seems to cover the meaning of promise.

A sense of immediacy and "friendliness" runs throughout the text: through the conversational form "Let's play!", the authors seem to speak to their imagined audience, trying to transform the "asynchronous writing" typical of web pages into a "synchronous dimension".

Last but not least, there is an important feature of page design that is worthy of comment: the use of images. Each of the five key areas of the site are symbolised by an image, which represents the content of the hyperlink: therefore, as suggested in the reading, there is a "semiotic relationship between text and graphics".

The use of images is also a noteworthy feature of the website "The Digital Age". Its front part is an interesting hybrid of visual and linguistic semiology. The image of the bulb, already found in the previous site, is particularly interesting. However, while in "Learning vocabulary with games" the relationship text-graphics was quite explicit thanks to the sentence "our learning games will give your brain a workout!", which functioned as a sort of explanation, here the whole image, besides being quite small and placed almost at the bottom right corner of the page, is constructed in a very subtle way: the wire inside the bulb is also the initial letter of the verb "Illuminate", immediately followed by the short sentence "Where Bright Ideas Meet". As you have to click on the image if you want to clearly read the sentence and understand the meaning of the whole image, it seems that the creator wants to conceal to some extent the overall structure of the website.

The front page gives us little information about the "real" structure of the site and the possible "tours". The complex array of possibilities is, in a certain sense, concealed: as the website is "a very large building", the web designer provides a site map in the reception area. If you click on the site map, you will see a number of hyperlinks introduced by an -ing form ("Starting", "Enabling", etc.). All the hyperlinks consist of simple or post-modified noun phrases and lexical pairs/triads, such as "Adoption/Promotion".

It is notable that the framework of this website is far more "sophisticated" than the previous one. The key word "learning" is basically the same, but while in the first site its semantic importance was highlighted by the repetition, here the author exploits a sort of "colour code" in order to cast light on the significance of "learning". The word "elearn" - which can be extrapolated from "elearnspace", the noun phrase "everything elearning" and the complete sentence "If you are interested..." are all red, thus creating a sort of lexical chain that runs throughout the text.

One further example of this fundamental hypertext is noteworthy: the close relationship between the word "space" and the big graphic depicting the planetary system, placed at the bottom of the page.

The body of the text is made up of three short paragraphs containing an interesting deictic feature ("This") and a series of dynamic and imperative verbs ("Click...Read...Skim...").

Last but not least, the already mentioned sentence "If you are interested in how learning is changing, please visit my connectivism site" is particularly worthy of comment for two reasons: it is the only sentence typed in bold and italics and is explicitly addressed to the online community ("you"). As in the first website, a reader/viewer of this site could be anyone: either a casual 'surfer' or a person who is particularly interested in elearning.

In my opinion, all the linguistic and graphological elements analysed so far sum up the three central features that make a website a website: the emphasis on information access with links to numerous sites of interest; the use of accompanying images; the fact that the sites are aimed at a potentially large, though imagined, audience.

These key elements "prove" that if it is true that content is the main feature of a website, it is also true that what immediately grasps the viewer's attention is the way this content is presented and organised.

Therefore, web pages may be considered "online brochures", as they combine words to give information about what they offer and pictures to capture the visitors' attention.