Evaluative Essay: Evaluating a Website

Claim: X is/is not a fair/good/superb, etc. Y

You are one of four interns in a small but "hot" young design company. The head of the marketing department has decided she needs an assistant, and she's thinking about hiring one of the interns. Since the company is rapidly expanding, the position has plenty of room for growth. If selected, you may one day handle your own accounts and get a share in the company's profits, or with the experience you gain, become head of marketing at this or a comparable company.

The job requires somebody who has the verbal virtuosity to sell clients on the skill of your company's designers–to help clients appreciate the quality of the products you will deliver, so that they will be quite willing to pay more than your competitors charge. Your designers are a brilliant, highly intuitive bunch, but they are not always able to articulate why they have made particular choices in layout and graphics. That would be your job.

To help her decide who can best explain how copy, graphics and the structure of a site satisfy a client's greatest expectations, the head of marketing has asked you each to write an evaluation of a superb website and then give a presentation of your critique to the rest of the company.

Your claim: X (a superb website of your choice) is an excellent Y (genre of site, such as retail, non-profit, mainstream movie, etc). Given the target audience and rhetorical goal(s) of the site, what criteria for excellence does this site establish and meet?

The criteria are the reasons why you believe the site packs more of a rhetorical punch than similar sites. Be sure to elaborate on criteria so that they can distinguish between say, superlative and just "good." For example, asserting that a Dawson's Creek fan site is superlative because it displays still shots from the show won't distinguish the quality and effect of those graphics from other Dawson's Creek fan sits that would qualify as merely "good."

Be sure to explain, when matching the features of the site to the criteria you set forth, how design choices tap into the psychology of targeted users to sway them to make impulse purchases, rally around a political cause, volunteer time, adopt a pet, or whatever it is the site persuades its audience to do/believe. For this essay, you can certainly be more critical of how sites manipulate and indoctrinate audiences, but you might keep in mind that most actual clients would not want to see themselves as wholly unethical with regard to their marketing strategies.

Possible Organization

I. Briefly characterize the site and explain its rhetorical goal(s) with regard to the target audience: What kind of site is this? Who is it trying to persuade? To do and/or believe what? Then make your claim, a paraphrase, tailored to the site under analysis, of "X is an excellent Y."

II. Given an account of the target audience. What type of users does the site project as an audience? Who does the site seek to persuade? Your prospective supervisor will be very impressed by research indicating demographics for the target audience.

III. Explain one criteria and "match" it to the features of the site. (See example of criteria and an accompanying "match argument" for www.mcdonalds.com, below).

IV. Explain another criteria and "match" it to features of the site.

V. Explain another criteria and "match" it to features of the site.

VI. Conclude by explaining how this site, relative to others of its kind, more powerfully sways its target audience.

Assignment Goals

  • To develop, organize and argue for an evaluation in accord with models for evaluative essays presented in college rhetorics such as Writing Arguments (John D. Ramage and John C. Bean), The Structure of Argument (Annette T. Rottenberg) and Everything’s an Argument (Andrea A. Lunsford, John J. Ruszkiewicz). These models train students to develop and defend evaluative criteria.
  • To acquire the ability to locate websites on the internet.
  • To identify and articulate the persuasive value of technologies specific to website design.
  • To infer features of the target audience for a specific rhetorical address, and to give evidence to support these inferences.
  • To develop descriptive writing skills, especially with regard to accuracy, elaboration and style.

Sample criteria and "match argument"

www.mcdonalds.com: Having It the McDonald's Way

Claim. www.mcdonalds.com impresses users that not only is McDonald's "the largest and best known global foodservice retailer," but this retail foodservice site is the ultimate tool for complete McDoctrination of the child within us all.

Rhetorical (corporate) goal. Ultimately, to increase sales and market share.

Audience. Children young and old who long for instant gratification, as well as amusement and a feeling of security within a nurturing environment.

Criteria for excellence.

The site makes calculated use of bright colors, graphics, moving images, and McDonald's characters to 1) prompt children to beg their parents to go to McDonald's 2) foster the need to go to McDonald's by simulating the experience of going to McDonald's, a place where all needs will be met 3) build ethos for McDonald's as a caring, responsive, clean, efficient, happy and powerful force in the world, thereby encouraging capital investment.

Sample "match argument." A "match argument" uses descriptive writing to match specific features on the site to criteria for excellence.

The site especially targets young children, prompting them to respond to simulated animation by running to Mom or Dad, tugging on their sleeve, and begging, "McDonald's! Take me to McDonald's!" The homepage presents, floating at the top, an irresistible link for children–a big bubble emerging from Ronald McDonald's head to promote currently featured Happy Meal giveaway toy items. This month [October of 1999] the copy inside the bubble, printed on an orange disc to suggest a pumpkin or the top of a pail, reads: "McDonald's Happy Meal, featuring Halloween pails." Clicking here, children proceed to a page with a movie screen, framed in white and set against a Barney-purple background inlaid with black bats. The simulated movie feature especially uses motion to make kids want those pails, now: Friendly and happy Ronald rises into view to announce again, "McDonald's Happy Meal, featuring Halloween Pails," then, like a puppet, he descends. Under pulsing stars, a "spooky" (but not too spooky), Halloweenscape looms into view, inviting the trick-or-treater to venture along a silhouette of fence railings leading to a rickety, haunted (but well-lit), house. The featured white and orange Halloween pails (one with a pumpkin handle and one with a bat handle) fly into view. Fantastical, they seem to originate from a glowing, pocked, cheese-like moon. What child in the U.S. doesn't spend all of October feverishly anticipating the fall of darkness of October 31? What child, after viewing this Happy Meal promotion, would not believe that a McDonald's Halloween pail was absolutely necessary for his or her trick-or-treating experience?

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