Rhetorical Analysis

The Nitty Gritty

This rhetorical analysis will judge a website based upon three distinct criteria: the quality of writing, visual design, and usability. Within each of these criteria, the site will further be judged on the more specific concerns that coalesce to form a cohesive website. Furthermore, images will be used throughout the analysis to reinforce and explain arguments regarding the judgment of the website based upon said criteria.

Writing – Authorial voice, Audience, Purpose

• Authorial voice – What kind of tone does this website have? Is it professional, informal? Are there multiple writers, or does all the information come from one source? What kind of tone is appropriate for the content it provides? Does it successfully convey the information it is meant to? Would it benefit from a different form of voice?
  Audience – What readership is this website aimed at? Does it successfully relate to this audience? How does it benefit this audience, or how could it better service this audience? What kind of competition does this website face for the audience it is trying to cater to?
  Purpose – What is the content of this website? Why does it exist? Does it successfully provide an adequate amount of content in the field it is trying to participate?
  

Visual Design—Attractiveness, Cleanliness, Purpose

• Attractiveness – Is this website pleasant on the eyes? Is it legible? How does the website use color? How does the website use images?
  Cleanliness – Is the website cluttered, or open? Is the design consistent, or a mish-mash of styles? How is the content presented?
  Purpose – What kind of website is this? Is the visual design appropriate for the format of the content and the readership being addressed?

Usability—Ease-of-use, Functionality, Purpose

Ease-of-use – Is the website easy to navigate? Is content easy to access? Is the format of the site intuitive?
Functionality – What kind of services does this website offer, if any? Is content interactive, or static? Do the services offered relate to the main goal of the website?
Purpose – Does the structure of the website successfully convey the content? Could it be formatted in a different way to better serve the audience? Is it a hindrance or a benefit to the reader?

Website Introduction

The target of our merciless friendly expose is the gaming blog Joystiq.com. For the unfamiliar, Joystiq is a multi-author blog officially owned by Weblogs, Inc., aka AOL’s blogging network. AOL owns a pretty substantial network of blogs such as Engadget and Autoblog that, like Joystiq, are among some of the most visited in their respective domains. Joystiq’s focus is on video games—more specifically, most of the posts on Joystiq are covering breaking news stories. As a blog, Joystiq depends upon a regular flow of new content and information to keep them ahead of the competition. For this rhetorical analysis, we’ll take a look at what Joystiq does well, what it does poorly, and why you should visit it every day.*

*Brand loyalty (I'm brainwashed, I can't help it!)

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Writing

The first thing you may notice after visiting Joystiq for the first time is that it is, in fact, a blog. And since blogs are pretty much all about the text, the quality of writing is obviously important. So how does Joystiq stack up?

Authorial Voice

Unlike many blogs that are the personal projects of a single person, Joystiq is maintained by quite a few different people. This makes it a little difficult to establish a single authorial voice for the website, but after reading a few stories it’s obvious that there’s a general tone that’s presented in most of the writing. Nearly all the writers employ a very informal, personable style, putting their own personal touches on stories instead of merely presenting them in a dry, straightforward manner. Take, for example, this story, which is indicative of the way many articles on Joystiq are written: We’re applying to work at Microsoft’s ‘Halo Studio’.

The introduction to this piece lets us know two things about the way Joystiq often presents news stories. Humor (especially of the self-deprecating variety) is used to add a personal touch to what amounts to little more than a fact sheet about a job. Second, the author presents himself as a fan of Halo, which implies he’s a fan of video games in general.

It’s pretty obvious that most people who blog for a living write about a topic they’re interested in, but it’s still an important part of Joystiq’s voice. Though it’s corporate-owned and staffed by multiple authors, it’s still a by the fans for the fans entity. This style of writing is very effective for a blog. It allows readers to feel a personal affinity for the writers, who aren’t afraid to make fun of themselves, and demonstrate a clear knowledge of the topic they're covering. The informal style also allows for pop culture references and goofy images (more on those later).

Audience

By the fans, for the fans…so, who are the fans? Well, the fans are people who play video games. If you don’t play video games, are you going to go to Joystiq? Will you have ever even heard of Joystiq? Probably not. Joystiq’s strength in catering to gamers is a weakness in regards to the general public. It’s unlikely that visiting Joystiq will convert someone with no previous video game interest into an avid reader.

Joystiq also faces stiff competition in the gaming blog arena—it’s certainly not alone in providing the kind of content it does. One of its competitors, Kotaku, actually ranks about 1100 sites above Joystiq on Alexa’s traffic rating (Joystiq hovers around the 2000 range). Both sites are gaming blogs and offer similar content: news stories presented in an informal manner, hands-on previews of software, interviews with developers, and feature pieces that go more in-depth. Ultimately, Joystiq doesn’t offer any “killer feature” that distinguishes itself from the crowd, making it a personal decision for readers based upon writing style. Often the simple fact of one site breaking a news story before another can lead to an increase in traffic, especially if that story makes it big on Digg.com.

Purpose

Here’s the recap for the writing portion of Joystiq: News stories are presented in a friendly way by people who are real fans of the topics they cover, and it shows. Anyone looking for video game news will find their needs well-met by Joystiq, but those who aren’t interested in games probably won’t find much to keep them coming back. Additionally, it faces stiff competition from sites that cover the same content, and Joystiq doesn’t stand out as being head-and-shoulders above the crowd; it’s more like a very attractive, five-foot-ten member of that crowd.

Visual Design

So Joystiq isn’t written by incompetents or 12-year-olds. That’s certainly a good first step, but we’re not out of the woods yet. If the text is okay, it’s time to zoom out and look at everything that surrounds the writing. How does it shape up? Is it slick or fugly? Let’s take a look.

Attractiveness

We’ll shrug aside any thoughts of Joystiq’s inner beauty and focus purely on the superficial. Take a look at the Joystiq color scheme, and you’ll see that it follows some of the color guidelines we’ve read about. There’s enough color on the page to make the site attractive, but not so much that it looks gaudy or mismatched. The content area is white with black text, which is easy on the eyes—an important feature for people who are staring at a screen all day playing video games or reading about them.

Blue is the second component of the theme, and is the color of most of Joystiq’s links and the background that the content area rests on top of. Depending on the resolution of your monitor, you’ll see very little or quite a bit of this color, as the content area is a static width. However, by choosing a fairly light shade of blue, they made sure that it’s not at all hard on the eyes. There's actually a very subtle gradient starting from the top that fades to a lighter blue further down the page.

Next, there’s orange, the third major color of the layout. The logo is orange, and the “Breaking news” and headlines links are a slightly darker shade of red. These draw your eye simply because they’re a bit brighter than anything else on the screen. The logo, especially, stands out; all it takes is an interesting font and a dash of color to grab your attention.

Let’s compare Joystiq’s front page to rival blog Kotaku. Aside from what seems like an inferior layout—a subject we’ll get to in a bit—Kotaku also seems to be…well, uglier. The green/maroon color scheme on a vanilla background just doesn’t work quite as well as Joystiq's, which feels a little sharper and cleaner.

Then there’s images. Every single story on Joystiq is complemented by an image—a lot of times, however, these images don’t have a whole lot to do with the stories they’re attached to. There’s always a reference of some kind, but often the writers choose pictures for comedic purposes rather than informative ones. Here’s an example from an article about video game developer Ken Levine. This blogger is obviously a fan.

Photoshopped images and lolcats are commonplace: if you’re a fan of traditional internet humor, this aspect of Joystiq’s informal attitude will make you feel right at home. Most of the time, the images fulfill their role of drawing attention to their story quite effectively. Sometimes, however, bloggers like to use images that are quite tall, vertically, which results in unnecessary scrolling to get to the content of a story. Images that are wider than they are tall are definitely the way to go when the images take up the entire width of the content area.

Cleanliness

This topic overlaps somewhat with the third category, usability, as they both deal with the breakdown of content distribution. A messy layout is both visually detrimental and navigationally harmful, making your site ugly and hard to move around at the same time. From a purely aesthetic point-of-view, Joystiq sports a very rigid, simple layout.

Three columns display all the site’s information: navigational links are on the left, content is in the middle, and additional links and features are on the right. Additionally, links to all the most important categories are spread across a gray bar above the content area. Overall, it’s a clean layout and it’s presented in an attractive manner. The only negative is that there’s so much content on display, packed into such a small area, it can be a little overwhelming.

The site’s consistency is the biggest plus; no matter what article you’re reading, the same navigational links will be in place. The only exception to this is when navigating the galleries, which forgo the three column layout to make room for larger images. However, the galleries are pretty attractive themselves, and a link is always in place leading back to Joystiq’s index page.

Purpose

Joystiq is recognizable as a blog and follows most of the conventions of typical websites: lots of in-text hyperlinks, sidebar navigation, a columnar layout, and lots of images. It’s a little busy, but the visual style serves its audience appropriately; the kinds of people who visit Joystiq on a regular basis will be familiar with web conventions and will have little trouble with the way the site flows.

Usability

Finally, the third category of endless criticism! We’re almost at the 2000 word mark. What more could possibly be said about this website? Well, just as writing and design are important, so’s the usability. After all, we want to know exactly what this site offers aside from the static text. Is it clunky, or well designed? Feature-packed or upsettingly sparse? Read on.

Ease-of-use

Being able to navigate a website is, obviously, critical. That’s a no-brainer. If it’s hard to get to the meat, nobody’s going to stick around long enough for dinner. This metaphor breaks down if you bring up vegetarians, so we’ll just pretend they don’t use the internet.

As I already mentioned briefly, Joystiq’s navigation is pretty typical. The main focus of attention is the middle column, which contains all the articles published on the site. Every headline is a link to a permanent page dedicated to that individual story, and if a story has been obtained from another website, the featured image will link to that site as a form of attribution. Scroll down far enough and you’ll get to the “next page” link, which will bring up a second page of articles that looks identical to the first (with a simple /page2/ tacked onto the URL). The navigation remains in place, the stories are simply a bit older. This is a very easy way to navigate through a few days worth of news. If you’re looking for something a little more date-specific, however, it’s not quite so easy.

All the links on the left-hand navigation will bring up a specific category of stories in the content window; so will the main category links across the horizontal gray navigation bar. This is a pretty typical design and easy for most people to navigate. Unfortunately, there’s no specific archive of posts by week or month. If you want to find an old story, you’ll have to know what category it’s in to make the process quicker—or simply scroll through page after page of content.

Functionality

As a blog, most of the information at Joystiq is on a one-way trip from them to us. It lacks the extreme level of interactivity of a site such as, say, Youtube. But it’s far from a static site—like many blogs, Joystiq allows comments on each of its posts, and in general the stories encourage discussion. More comments indicate more reader interest, and more reader interest = successful blogging!

Joystiq also offers most of the features we’ve come to expect of a well-built website in this day and age. Here are some examples of interactive features it makes use of: RSS feeds, a Search system (powered by Google!), bookmarking tools, Twitter integration, tag clouds, and revolving links from networked blogs. RSS feeds are a must for blogs, and any site without a search system is severely lacking. Joystiq’s search works just fine, although sponsored links and around-the-web results can be a little too easy to mistake for the site’s own content. The Twitter box seems to be a bit underused, and may be a feature that sees growth over the next year or two as Twitter continues to become more and more popular; as it is now, it’s kind of a waste of space.

Joystiq relies heavily on tagging for categorization, as every story is tagged with appropriate words to make sure it shows up whenever users are searching for a particular topic. More and more blogs and other sites are starting to heavily tag all kinds of content, and the tag cloud is one example of how useful this system can be: at a glance, the most popular topics are on display and clickable.

Joystiq is feature-packed for a blog, and as I’ve mentioned once or twice, the amount of content crammed on screen can almost be a bit overwhelming. Most visitors won’t use (or read) most of the information on display, and will likely disregard just about everything that’s not in the middle column. Joystiq doesn’t do anything revolutionary with its design, or offer any mind-blowing features, but it does promote its content very effectively.

Purpose

Joystiq’s design is functional and fairly intuitive. It’s slightly overcrowded and has some features that could be removed to streamline the interface and spread things out a little bit more to relieve that uncomfortable eight-people-in-an-elevator feeling. The Twitter updates are mostly useless, and some of the Weblogs, Inc. links on the right sidebar are a bit excessive—but that’s a price you pay as a corporate entity. Overall, more blogs should aim to be this feature-packed, content-rich, and user-friendly.

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The Good
+ Tons of content
+ Informal, friendly, well-written
+ Attractive design
+ Lots of features

The Bad
- A little cramped
- No groundbreaking material
- Appeals to a select audience

tl;dr version

Were I to unexpectedly assign a letter grade to Joystiq, I’d give it a B+. Basically, it’s a pretty great website. Visit it!

 

 

--Wesley Fenlon