Reflection

Our rhetorical decisions started with the theme of the website we chose.  We picked a darker theme with a lot of grey, black, and red to emphasize the gravity and darkness associated with our controversial social issue.  We wanted to put the controversy right in the visitors’ face when they opened the site so that the first thing they would see is the title which stresses the immediate severity of the issue of gun control, so we made that the biggest and boldest on the page.  In our subtitle we chose to highlight the confusion and debate surrounding the role and nature of gun culture in America and to get the viewer thinking about where he/she stands. We chose to include a video that showcases the dichotomy of gun control and how differently separate sides of the issue view it.  We also chose the video to add a little comic relief and dram the visitor deeper into the website because if our home page was just text it would be much more likely that the visitor would lose interest quickly and not continue on to the essence of our site.  We chose only to include the single video because we did not want multiple videos or other forms of media to distract from the main issue we are discussing.  We also wanted to limit the number of videos and media we included because they tend to contain their own bias and we wanted to keep our site as analytical and unbiased as possible so only included the one video where we felt we really needed it because we don’t want the viewers to develop their own bias before reading our research and analysis.  We chose have a simpler website because we didn’t want any flashy media to distract from the hard research and analysis we have done.  We want the visitor to visit because they are curious and interested in the topic rather than just being entertained by media.  At the end, once we had all our information in, we decided to clean up the site and make it easier to navigate so that our viewers would not be turned away from the site because it’s too hard to get to where they want to get.  We were able to do this by including links on the title pages to their corresponding subpages.  The title pages are all included in a menu bar that follows the visitor no matter where he/she navigates making jumping from one part of the site to another very simple.  One site we liked was NRA’s main site, it is very easy to follow and is full of valuable information.  However, we wanted a site that was just as easy to navigate and informative but without the distractions that come from the flashy nature of their site.  We feel we achieved this goal through our unbiased representation of the research we have conducted for this site.