I chose to analyze Berkeley’s website: http://shakespearestaging.berkeley.edu. On the homepage and in the first sentence, the website states not only the audience Shakespeare reaches, but who they’re trying to reach as well. Their audience is primarily teachers, students, scholars, and performers who are all either studying or writing about Shakespeare. The authors of this website (Berkeley Shakespeare Program and other committees) created a website to help their audience gather a better understanding of Shakespeare and his plays.
The website is divided into sections: kinds of plays, the time period of the play, and the topics discussed in the play. I think the division of the plays makes it easier for users to navigate the website and is something that we should incorporate into the website our class makes. Visual wise, I like how the website is very easy on the eye. The colors coordinate well and the pictures make the website more appealing and less plain. The font is easy to read. It’s a very well-constructed website. Something Berkeley did that I think we should also do is include a description or plot summary of the plays. When you click on a link for a play, like “The Tempest” for example, it takes you to a page with a description and pictures. I think the pictures are very important, especially for Shakespeare’s plays. The pictures help readers visualise what Shakespeare is trying to portray in his play and they even help you follow along with the plot summary. A change I would make to the website is altering the Flesch-Kincaid grade level. This level of writing seems to be very advanced; I would predict around 12th grade reading level or higher. This would be acceptable if the audience of this website was strictly scholars. But, because this website is also for students, I think the grade level should hover between 8-10. This is a sweet spot for many technical writing and I think it should be incorporated into this website since it reaches a vast audience who come from very different educational backgrounds. As a grammar buff, I also appreciate the fact that they included a bibliography with their description of the play. It’s important to give credit to authors or just places where the authors might’ve found supporting details. It also helps to put them with the description because if a scholar or anyone wanted to continue their research, they can look at the bibliography and see if there’s anything there worth researching more in depth. Overall, I think the Berkeley Shakespeare archive website is a good resource. It is easy to navigate for all audiences, but it isn’t the easiest to understand. With Shakespearean language already being hard enough to interpret, I think Berkeley could knock their vocabulary level down a few notches to make their descriptions more understandable for every user. The website is very visually pleasing and the purpose of the website is very clear: to inform users about any Shakespeare play they wish to know about. With a few changes to the website, I believe “Shakespeare’s Staging” could be a very useful resource for all audiences. Picture source: http://dev-shakespearestaging.pantheon.berkeley.edu/images/the-tempest-at-the-faculty-glade-ucberkeley-1993
3 Comments
Bella Blaney
9/16/2019 04:17:40 pm
I agree that should include a bibliography after the play description, it is very important to give the people credit and it's a vital part of making the archive accurate as well as useful.
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meg
9/16/2019 06:20:39 pm
Absolutely agree that the description of the plays is necessary! The information that the site provides is great but like you said, not well organized.
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Eli
9/17/2019 05:58:46 am
I also really appreciated how the site included a short text concerning the purpose of the site. It left no room for guess work. I had not thought about making the reading level of an archive like this relatively low so that it would be easy even for a young reader to understand. This is something I would like to include in my archive.
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