Design for all publics

Besides good writing and reliable sources, the layout of a webpage is important to attract the readers’ attention.

According to Victor Keegan, The age-old problem of online inclusion, published by The Guardian (2007),elderly people especially people in the 50s finds internet activities too complicated. Keegan states that those people are either “socially isolated” or they do not share common interest with the others who surfs the net. Studies found in UK that only 20% of 65 years old have internet access at home. Organisation has tried to come up with different ideas to occupy them into the latest trend but find difficulties in reaching them. Imagine MySpace were to design “MySpace for the 50-plus crowd”, it is doubt to be successful as the website is too funky. Well, event if it is successful, they may only attract people from the age group but not specifically just people over 50s.

After reading the article, I personally think that part of the reason the elderly are not attracted to latest trend because of the complicated navigation in all websites. Internet is like intertextuality (Walsh 2006, p.25) and they need to know the symbols or sign to move around in a website. Thanks to Silver Surfers' Day , the elderly citizen in UK can now learn to access to the internet.

Web designers now concentrate more on Johnsons' "romancing the hypertext" instead of focusing on the 'communications architects'(Schriver 2003 p.363). As internet allows navigation to leads to non-linear pathways,(Kress & Leeuwen 2006,p.204), web designer should allow clear navigation and hyperlinks to occupied the non-experience internet user. One of the examples of bad hyperlink is the social-networking web site, MySpace which was voted as the worst web sites last year. (PC World 2006)

Additional Link:
Silver Surfers'Day

Reference List:

Keegan, V. 2007, The Age-old Problem of Online Inclusion [Online, accessed 4 June 2007]
URL: http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/comment/0,,2071322,00.html

Kress, G. & Leeuwen, T.V. 2006, 'Chapter six: The meaning of composition', Reading images: The Grammar of Visual Design, (2nd ed.), Routledge, London.

Schriver, K.A. 2003, 'Chapter six: The interplay of words and pictures, The Dynamics of Document Design: creating texts for readers', Wiley Computer Pub., New York.

Tynan, D. 2006, PC World – The 25 Worst Web Sites [Online, accessed 4 June 2007]
URL: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127116-page,8-c,sites/article.html#

Walsh, M. 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, The Australian journal of language and literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 24- 37.