The website I analyzed was called Goarmy.com. It is a website designed to make people join the army. It shows job opportunities in the army, and has lots of videos about what people who have those jobs do. It also has videos of people in the army saying what their job is an how much they love it and how the army has done so much for them and bla bla bla. Note: most of the public would probably hate the jobs that these people say are so great. The rest of the features generally provide information about the army (like str star, who thinks that "eat me" is a swear word). Unfortunately, all the information has a biased spin on it, to make people think "ooh, I want to join the army, it sounds so fun!" Instead of stating the facts, Goarmy.com brushes over things like you will probably get stabbed or blown up or bleed to death, and that you will be killing innocent people left right and center.

Visual Layout

• When I look at Goarmy.com, The first thing that catches my eye is the large window showing a video of people doing army stuff, like sliding down a mountain in a tank while blowing stuff up.
• The black backround gives the site a military look, and the violent video adds to the feeling.
• The video on the site adds value to it because it shows some of the horrible things you will have to do if you join the army.
• Goarmy.com loaded in about 3 seconds. It was not worth the wait because I do not want to join the army.
• The large, violent video draws people's eyes to it. Right below the video, where the readers will look, are the options that you can click on to learn about different jobs. There isn't much text, only buttons and videos

Consistency Structures

• Almost all the elements in the border stay the same all over the site, except the buttons reorganize themselves and sometimes new ones appear. The things that stay the same are:
  • The black background
  • The U.S. Army symbol
  • The different category selections
  • The search and questions box
• The reptition helps the purpose of the website because it makes it uniform, like the army, and it is nice if the navigation is always the same
• The color scheme was very consistent. Practically everything was yellow, grey, and black.
• The font size was also consistant. The same font and font size was used in the same spaces all over the site

Color Scheme

• The dark theme adds to the disciplined army feeling of the site.

Content Bias

• The site was created to make people join the army.
• All the information is facts, but they did not show the bad stuff about the army, and they put a good spin on everything.
• There is a pro-army bias.

Information

• The site doesn't say when the information was first placed there.
• The site was last updated 10/28/08.
• Since it is the army's website, the information has to be current.
• Note: if you go back to this site now, it will probably have been updated and had a different layout than the one described here.

Content Source

• The U.S. army is responsible for this site.
• The qualifications of the author of this site: knows about the army. Maybe he or she served in it.
• There is no way to verify the ligitimacy of the author.
• There are no sponsors listed that I could find.
• There are no othere sources cited on this site that I could find.
• The domain extension of the site is .com, which stands for commercial. This means that the site is trying to sell you something, or, such as in this case, make you join an organization.

Content Corroboration

• Many other sites have information on the army.
• Their information is the same. Goarmy.com has to be truthfull, or someone would find out and sue them.
• Like I said, many other sources contain the same information as this one. Many of them are valid.

Goarmy.com logo