Joanne Perry

AS Media Studies

Focus Group 2

After creating my website, I decided to carry out another focus group to my target audience in or-der for me to ensure that my website is to the best quality it can be. Within carrying out this focus group, I received a lot of feedback due to my focus group consisting of at least 20 people in order to receive as much feedback as possible. Everybody’s comments were relatively similar which meets the stereotype of my target audience of teenage girls liking the colour pink and other con-ventional elements I have placed on the website.

The main things that were continuously praised about my website were the logo, the amount of text, images, video, the help finder feature and the layout. These features, other than the help finder, were the most important features which consisted of my website and therefore represents that these features meet the conventions of a website in order to appeal to my target audience. These elements also present a strong, professional look on the website which makes it appealing to the audience due to it being of such a high standard. My website represented many polysemic elements which I aimed to project. For example, I wanted the logo to have a different meaning to various people. The various meanings it could have is death, innocence, flying to recovery and more. This allows the logo to appeal to more of a mass audience due to the way it is represented to different people.

The amount of text represents a lot of detail which appeals to a lot of people due to the serious tone in which my charity campaign website portrays. The layout also represents the professional, serious manor which the text also indicates. This appeals to the audience as they do not want the illness to be portrayed in any other way other than serious and fatal and therefore if the website had too many images rather than text, it would not denote this message as effectively.

However, nearly all of the people within my focus group mentioned that the text was too small on the website. Due to such a high number of my audience mentioning this, I will ensure that I change my text font and make it bigger in order for it to stand out and appeal more to my audience. The bigger text will also anchor in my target audience as it represents my target audience as being a fairly young age whereas smaller text is more formal and is regularly for older people due to them having the tendency to read more than the audience of teenage girls. There were also some girls who said that there is too much writing on the second page however I feel that this is hard to avoid due to them being real life recovery stories which users have submitted. Due to there being mixed feelings about this element, I will not change this as it represents more of a verisimilitude website aspect by the real life stories having a lot of text.

I also received feedback about the background being too plain. However, charity websites conven-tionally have plain background to induce a serious tone to the audience as a construct to invoke sympathy. Due to this feedback, I have chosen to still have a white background but include light, faded arrows in the background to represent an angels arrow. By invoking this, it still represents a plain, assertive background yet fulfils the need of the target audience of the background not being completely plain. The arrows can also represent the people suffering with an eating disorder, being struck by an arrow in order to recover. The arrows could be pointing upwards in order to also rep-resent the audiences way up to recovery. However, I could also include some arrows pointing down as this could represent the audience falling down and getting back up again in order for them to achieve recovery and insures them that the only way is back up.

In conclusion, I am happy with the feedback which I received from my focus group and I will care-fully consider the font sizing and background options in order to fulfil the needs and expectations of my target audience to create a professional, conventional website.