Blog 2

The college website that I choose to visit was the University of Florida’s. The modes of communication that were used to inform the audience about the university are linguistic, visual, and special. This makes sense for the context of the website since the University is choosing to share information about their school over the Internet. The author of the website used the linguistic mode by including the University of Florida on the homepage so that the intended audience automatically knows that they are looking at the University of Florida’s website. There are also important links at the top of the screen that say “About UF, Academics, Admission, Campus Life, Research, and Services”. These all are useful for the viewer In order to be able to navigate throughout the website. Also, there is an alert bout the Tropical Storm Isaac. This is important information for the students and any other person who is involved with the University of Florida to get information about their safety. The visual mode was used by incorporating the schools colors, orange and blue, into the website. It seems to me that the most important aspects and information about the school are at the top of the screen. The University of Florida is also located at the top left corner of the screen. This is the first thing that I noticed when I looked at the website because it is in the top right corner and it also is in a larger font than anything else on the page. There is also a slide show of pictures with captions in the middle of the screen to inform the audience of the types of things that the University of Florida is involved in. The spatial mode is used by grouping things under tabs. For example, there is a tab that says “for students” and under that tab there are links to pages that are resourceful for students. The location of the picture is in the middle of the page. This draws the viewer’s eyes automatically to the pictures. The purpose of this website is to reach out to perspective students, students, alumni, and anyone else who may want to seek information about the university; because of this everything that is in figure 2.2 from the reading under the section “things on the front page of a university website” are included on the University of Florida’s website. The things that are more difficult to find can be searched for in the search bar that is located in the top right corner of the homepage. I do agree with this lost of things people go to the site looking for because this is general information that one may need that is extremely relevant to campus life at the university and also from personal experience I know I have visited my universities website for some of the reasons listed in the ven diagram.