Web cred - Kimmons

My task was to discern the assigned web page www.anesi.com/titanic.htm, which is dedicated to the Titanic disaster of 1912. The page uses numerous paragraphs as well as charts and graphs to rely information and data revolving around the once touted “unsinkable” ship and its demise.

The title of the web page is “Titanic Disaster: Official Casualty Figures and Commentary” and was created without updates in 1997, an ancient time in the web design era. The audience for the page appears to be anyone who is interested in the Titanic tragedy, especially with the movie coming out at that time. The author of the site, Chuck Anesi, seems to be bias on the facts he displays on his site. In the reading, he tries to dismiss other reports about the Titanic in which he claims are follies as he urges other readers not to e-mail these “ridiculous observations.” The page has other links for more information, including sites to the Titanic movie, one to the encyclopedia-titanica.org site, a link to another Titanic page in his site and another site that didn’t open. However, figures on his site and the encyclopedia site differ. The encyclopedia says that 2,207 were on board and only 712 survived while his site says 2,224 on board and 711 survived.

Looking around Anesi’s site I could not find any credentials on him. He has links to other historical events, compositions and miscellaneous rants, all written by him. The site does have an e-mail address to contact Anesi but no phone or address. There is no discussion on the site but on his blog, The Lodge of Shingebiss, comments are allowed, although the only comments made in his latest post in 2007 appear to be spam in Chinese characters. I didn’t see any affiliations, associations or anybody sponsoring his site for that matter. All of the links on the home page take visitors to other pages designed by Anesi. His site appears to a personal web site tailored to his musings.

The appearance of the site is stuck in the late 1990s. The Titanic page uses a lone clip art icon and the graphs are in ugly color combinations. The text is way too long and entirely in bold face type. The text body should be broken into sections and not in bold since the headlines are small and look similar to the rest of the text. Besides numerous writing errors, the writing style is sometimes presented in a biased, authoritative speech that seems to say his site is right and everybody else is wrong. No advertisements can be found on the site. Page source can be accessed, though, where meta tags for description and keywords can be found. All in all, the page is in dire need of updated graphics, layout design and editing.

It took less than a second for me to grant this site no credibility, and just a few minutes of checking it out to realize that I was right. Not only is the appearance outdated but the style of the author’s writing is annoying and not credible. Just like its topic, this site sank to the bottom shortly after its inception.