Engl 308 Technical Writing: Assignment Answers

Website Discussion

Post your web sites with a brief description of the positives and negatives of the site for your classmates.

Identify 1 web site related to paying for nursing home care. Post the home page URL (or relevant portions of the site) for class review and discussion and summarize the key information contained in the discussion folder.  Identify the pros (positives) and cons (negatives) of the website in a narrative discussion.

URL of the selected site

https://www.medicare.gov.

Discussion on the website Medicare.gov

For this assignment we have chosen the site medicare.gov which is used for making payments for the medical care provided by different nursing and health care providing facilities in the country. While analysing the site we found some features that makes the site easy use and navigate between the different pages of the site.

Pros of the site

Use of Meta description: While analysing the site we found that all the pages of the site uses Meta description that improves its rank on the search engine results and thus users can easily find out the site from the search result list.

Responsive design of pages:  

The pages of this site is optimised and designed in responsive way which helps the users to access the site using different devices along with the consistent display on every device regardless of the size of the screen.

Use of Header tags: Furthermore, in our analysis we found that the pages of this site properly uses the header tags that makes the  content of the pages more understandable for  disabled user. Use of the header tags in the pages helps the users to scan the pages for the desired information within a short time span.

Cons of the site

Large block of test for links: On some of the pages of the site we found some internal links that consist of long block of text which reduces the user’s interest to further interact with the pages of the site.

Lack of height and width tag for images and GZIP encoding: The images used on different pages of the site does not have width and height tags for them which increases the loading time of the pages if the user has a slow internet connection. In addition to that, the pages of the site are not using GZIP encoding which is helpful in reduction of the load time for the pages on the different devices.

Bibliography

Chow, A.S., Bridges, M. and Commander, P., 2014. The website design and usability of US academic and public libraries. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 53(3), pp.253-265.

Sundeen, T., Vince Garland, K. and Wienke, W., 2015. Perceptions of special education doctoral websites: A multiyear investigation of website usability and navigability. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 47(4), pp.273-293.