Web Credibility

The page that I decided to use for the website credibility project is, http://bit.ly/9feGJZ. When searching “9/11 attack” on Google, it was only located three or four spots down on the list. I thought that it would make for a pretty interesting assignment as it a very poorly constructed web site; however, obviously it has received numerous hits and has a counter that says I am visitor number 924, 743.

This site seems to be complete, just poorly completed perhaps. The title of the page for apfn.org is “9-11 TERROR IN AMERICA,” and although it doesn’t have a last updated date at the bottom of the page, toward the top of the page it states, “(all links have been updated on 12/20/08).” I would assume that is the last time that the page has been updated. The audience for this website is very obviously 9/11 conspiracy followers and this is definitely the slant that the site takes as well. This web site is full of external links, all to what they point to as “evidence” of the 9/11 conspiracy that the government was involved with, or responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center. Although it states at the top of the site that links were last updated over 2 years ago, just about all of them seemed to still function. Some of the video clips do support the sites claims, although, some of them are legitimate news coverage that they claim as evidence of a government sponsored/falsified attack.

While the site does not list the person responsible for creating it, it was very obviously created by American Patriot Friends Network, as it says so at the top of the page. The company claims to have begun back in 1993. It also has a link that says “contact” at the bottom of the page that takes you to Outlook to send an email to the webmaster. This is a “.org” site and was very obviously set up by a non-profit organization to spread their beliefs. After back tracking to the home page for APFN, I was able to find out that the founder of the company is Kenneth L. Vardon and shows to have been last updated on 6/19/09. The site looks to be more of a personal stance on a situation as opposed to clear fact or any measurable accuracy. I did not see anything on the web site that mentions anything of a hard copy of this particular information, most of it is comprised of video clips and other external links.

The APFN site is not very professional looking what-so-ever. All text is centered, horrible color combinations for text and background that are very inconsistent and change numerous times while scrolling down the page. The text on the website is somewhat well written, although it is not in a very professional style or context. Merely opinion based text with little fact. The formatting of this site is absolutely horrible, no tables, looks like a basic HTML page like our first project. The headings are appropriate for what it discusses below for the most part and the navigation is pretty much at random. The images work just fine and the web site itself does not have sound, although the video clips all work just fine (although they are all external links, so they should). While most of the clips do support the claims of APFN, the statements that they make about the videos may or may not be credible themselves. As I previously stated, I found this site by searching “9/11 attack” on Google and this was the third or so link down. This is not too surprising to me however, since it has almost a million views, and obviously has numerous other sites linking to it. The site does not contain advertisements within it at all, most likely because at the bottom of the page it asks for “free will” donations. After viewing the sourcing I discovered that the site is set up very easily. It contains a few divs, looked like there was one fairly small table, and overall generally pretty basic.

All in all, APFN’s website is pretty poorly constructed and was set up on a very basic level. I was not impressed with the layout, nor the content of the page itself. I did not find this to be a very credible site and therefore I would not recommend it, even for those interested in 9/11 propaganda. Although it looks like it took the creator some time to collect and assemble his information, he just didn’t spend the time or use proper resources to publish his information.