Description

Description of Rhetorical Context

The rhetorical context of experiencedynamics is an advertisement for their usability services. The company helps corporations create webpages that are easy for customers and employees of the companies to use.

Description of the pages

Home

The Home page sets the tone of the website. The coloring is blues, greys, and black fonts with pastel colors (blue-grey, yellow-grey, grey-green, grey, purple-grey, and mauve-grey) on the graphics.The coloring is mostly blues, greys, and black. The 800 number is in the heading in large font--the same size as the pages headings, which are in dark blue blocks at the top of the screen.

A sans-serif font is used throughout the pages. In the upper right corner ther are three links, Particpate in a Study, Site Map, and Client Log In. In the upper left corner is the Experience Dynamics Professional Usability logo.

Under the headings are two columns of Special Event of a free seminar and a New Poster.

Underneath these two columns is a dark purple-grey bar and four columns of lighter purple grey headings with black font, What we do, News, Participate in a Study, and Why hire us?

These columns include links to other parts of the site. There is a large oval "sign up" link in the third column.

In the fourth column, diagonal to the "sign up" link is another link surrounded by white space, 15 Reasons to Hire Us.

This is followed by the site's repeated ending for the bottom of the page, a blue-grey bar containing the name, address, phone, and fax of Experience Dynamics. Underneath the bar in the smallest font of the page are seven links--home, about us, articles, services, science of usability, clients, contact us, and participate in a Study.The Particpate in a Study link is the only one in blue. The others are in a light grey font. These links are followed by a copyright date of 2001-2006 and a Privacy Policy link (in blue.)

About

The coloring is mostly blues, greys, and black. The 800 number is in the heading in large font--the same size as the pages headings, which are in dark blue blocks at the top of the screen. A sans-serif font is used throughout the pages. In the upper right corner ther are three links, Particpate in a Study, Site Map, and Client Log In. In the upper left corner is the Experience Dynamics Professional Usability logo.

On the left side of the page are four more links (all in blue)under the small black heading "Who we are." Directly underneath these links is a blog link to Frank Spiller's Experience Dynamics Blog. The word Blog is in large bold font. The link for the blog is in a grey-green rectangle with curved corners.

To the right of the left column containing the weblinks and blog information is a column that takes the rest of screen and under the large "Who we are" "Experts in Large Scale Websites and Complex Application Usability," which is underlined are three links, Partners, Vision, Jobs. Balancing the rectangle blog link is a purple-grey square on the right side with the title "Also See:" containing links to Science of Usability and Methodology. A line underneath the links allows emailing the page and a print-friendly version of the page.

The paragraphs under the "Who we are" are marked by questions in black font followed my one or two paragraphs of small print explaining in detail the answer. These paragraphs are followed by an answer in blue font, which is the same size as the black font. This methods is repeated three times on the home page.

At the bottom of the "Who we are" column is an "About Experience Dynamics" listing some of their clients. The paragraph ends with two links for printing and emailing the page.

At the bottom of the page is repeated bar with address, etc.

Articles

This page uses the same column layout of the About page. Same logo information at top and the arrows to the left columns with links to Research Newsletter and Published Works.

The large center column, taking 3/4 of the page, again has the small square on the right balancing the blog rectangle. This is separated from the masthead with blue-grey and grey lines.

The column has largest font Usability Articles in the left center of the page followed by smaller font "keep current with usability issues. A grey line separates these titles from a paragraph explaining why a customer would want these articles.

There are two links to usability blog articles followed by a bulleted list of eleven linked articles.

This is followed by a grey line. A "sign up" link is beneath this line followed by a bulleted list and a graphic soliciting subscriptions to the Newsletter (in red font). There is a photo of a female sitting at a computer with a coffee cup looking to the left of the screen.

Under this graphic is an light-purple oval with "Subscribe" in black font. Beneath this is another privacy link, proclaiming for the second time on the page, Privacy is protected. Period.

The page finishes with the typical printer-friendly and email links and the address bar in light purple-grey.

Services

The arrow leading to the left 1/4 column lists seven links to different services the company offer. In the 3/4 column there is the large-font title, Choosing Services, followed by the smaller font "Know your Options. This is followed by Products and Pricing links a three sentence paragraph followed by four questions.

The answers to the questions contain links and the typical three to four sentence answer. Most of these sentences are ten to twenty (or more) word sentences.

Question two contains an informational graphic chart divided into white and purple columnar halves. Purple is on the right. This graphic explains their testing process. The Xs in the rows appear to be hand drawn. The Xs are identical.

The page ends the same as the other pages.

Science of Usability

seven links in the left 1/4 column. another two column graphic. In the left column are the six pastel colored squares from the home page, minus the faces, and links to other pages.

Clients

The client page contains twenty seven links to Fortune 500 companies' case-studies to Experience Dynamics services.

In bold font--We can help you. and a link to the 15 reasons you should hire them.

Contact

The contact page repeats the address and shows a graphic of a map of the lower 48 states with the Portland to Vancouver, BC area highlighted and expanded, showing that Seattle is in between the two cities. The city of Portland is highlighted with an orange dot. This is the only use of orange on these pages.

Address and contact infor mation is repeated four times on this page. There are also four email addresses, the owner's, new business inquiries, media/public relations, and Research, collaboration and speaking engagements.

Analysis

Rhetorical Properties (rhetorical affordances) of the site pages

The Experience Dyanmics website uses a business-building/developing style with visual imagery to show customers they are experienced, efficient, and friendly. Their visual imagery of soft pastel colors on graphics arranges their products into a topical order. Part of this visual imagery is in the run-on use of their name experiencedynamics. At first glance, it is easy to read the word "experienced," and have to look again to see experience dynamics. This uses an ethos that they are knowledgeable about what they are doing.

The site uses twenty seven testimonies to lend credibility to their product. They also supply a great number of links for customers. The emotion experiencedynamics uses to appeal to viewers is to portray themselves as a Problem Solver. That is the appeal of all the links, the testimonies, and the soft colors. The only use of a graphic depicting a person is the one of the female with the coffee cup at the computer looking towards her right, the viewer's left. This picture is mostly in blue, except for her face.

They want to appear reasonable, so they give the viewer lots of reasons to use them. All the reasons are backed up by links to testimonies of the Fortune 500 companies' successes with experiencedynamics.

patterns of repetition

The top and bottom headings of each page are repeated throughout the site.

The use of dark purple-grey and light purple lines as horizontal dividers are also used to separate information.

Links are repeated throughout the site. The viewer has two or three opportunities per page to join the company.

patterns of sequencing

The major links are in a column at the upper left under the company logo. These links are sometimes repeated in the 3/4 column containing the main information of the page.

patterns of omission

The only price on these seven pages is $125 value, which they have given the viewer free. So, it looks easily affordable to small businesses. Low prices for this company's services start at $3,000, which they show as $3K.

People are omitted, except for the female in the newsletter ad.

anomalies of patterns

The use of the two orange circles to mark Portland, OR as the home of Experience Dynamics brings attention to the company's location--close to Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC.

The use of the female also brings attention to real people, pondering something. The company supplies itself as the answer--join them!

The use of putting the Newsletter in red font, when this is about the only use of red on the site, gives the Newsletter an urgency and sense of importance, like it's first aid or an emergency.

patterns of relationships

The pages of the website are easy to move in. They don't lead to dead ends. They all have a tone of convenience and ease to them. This part of the ethos the company is selling--problems solvers and making things easy for their customers. It's bad to sell easy web design to companies when your web site isn't easy to navigate.

There are several opportunities/invitations to join Experience Dynamics. They sell themselves as a solution to customer's problems by usability studies of customer's websites. These are on every page. The tone is a sales pitch.

Summary

This website is a sales pitch to international customers to help companies maintain/create easily navigated webpages. The tone is one of friendly guidance. "We can solve your problems."

Experience dynamics uses an ethos of credibility to give the customer the feeling of friendship/guide/problem-solver in a paternal sort of way. The customer has only to give consent,and problems vanish, customers increase. The use of soft pastels to correspond with the blue links and purple grey lines sooths the viewer and gives a continuity to the page. It also kind of makes them all look alike. The pastels gives a calm feeling to the pages, as if Experience Dynamics is in control.

If a customer makes it to the logo page, they get free advertising for their webpage. This rherorical tactic gives two uses, the possible customer can see what Experience Dynamics has accomplished and the aforementioned free advertising for the current customer.

The ethos of this presentation is to bring the customer into their "web" so the customer can't help but feel they need the help of experiencedynamics. There are many links that all lead to an "answer" of some kind. There are enough links on the page that after perusing a few pages, a customer can feel that they understand how the page is set up. To help customers feel this, ED has a page that defines "intuitive" as "easy to use."

The manner in which the pages are laid out, they are easy to use and supply many answers--all of which are the same--experiencedynamics is the answer. Their using an enthymeme. They want the customer to draw the conclusion--use their company.