Katies Website Review

Criteria for evaluating a website:
Name of the website - is it relevant to the content
How often has it been updated?
How easy is it to navigate?
Is there an index on the website to help users navigate the site
Who are the authors of the website, are they credible? Is there an internal search facility to help the user find the information they require? The number of hits the site has received - determines how many people use the site
How easy the actual site is to find, e.g. is it available through all search engines - google, bing etc
Are external links valid/active?




A Good website:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website
This website contains an encyclopaedia of information, which can be edited by other users, either to make corrections or updates. The name of the website is relevant to the content – combining ‘wiki’ – where users are able to edit and update information in a web-based format, and ‘pedia’ – a shortened version of encyclopaedia.

The layout is plain and simple, and easy to read, with black text and a white background, similar to a text book or article. It also contains text underlined and blue in colour over certain words, and when these are clicked, they can be used to further knowledge in the subject area.

The site is easy to navigate, and contains and index, and a search engine
It also contains references of where the author gathered their information, and these usually are hyperlinked taking you directly to the cited article.

Access is open to anyone, there is no need to sign in or join to view information.


The Wikipedia website is easily found when searched in google, and when searching for a specific topic or event, for example, ‘pollution’, or WWII in a separate search engine such as google, wikipedia is one of the top results produced.

To conclude, Wikipedia is a good tool for general knowledge, and widening ones horizons, but the reader must be cautious by using this website, as the authors are not accredited or academic writers, and there is not way to validate whether or not the information they provide is correct. However, this work can be edited and corrected by someone else if they know it is wrong. Therefore this website should not be used as a basis for academic referencing, but to provide as basic understanding, and then the reader can gather keyword from this and carry out further research.








A bad website:
http://www.zyra.org.uk/index.htm
This is a very strange website. The website’s name does not relate to its content. The website has been designed to contain ‘a bit of everything’, but really it just contains random things which do not seem to be linked together.
Within the website, there are a large amount of bright colours, different size texts, and random images. These are all very distracting and make it difficult to read the text and find what you are looking for.

When it comes to searching for information on this site, it becomes very complicated. There is no search box or index at the side or top of the page. To find anything there is a choice between the options whether to search by ‘categories’, ‘Site Index’ (A-Z), ‘What New Index’, ‘Random Selector’ ( As if it wasn’t random enough already!) and the final option is ‘Everything’, which is just a duplication of the site index, which both have 36,869 index entries. Even if you choose to find items in this way, some of the indexes are labelled in a way that means you cannot identify what is on that page (eg: ‘000; !;’ ‘die Fluglinie mit den günstigen Preisen etc’)




This website does not state when it was last updated, and a few of the links display ‘page not found’ when they are clicked on.

Any of the information on this site is not suitable to be used for academic work, as there are no references, and these sites and links are not accredited or validated.

This site has a hit counter, stating it has had 569,572 hits since it has been created, so it must be quite popular.

To conclude, If you have a lot of time on your hands or are bored then this is a good site to learn random facts and information, but other than that it is not really useful.