I felt that this was an interesting article. Companies spend a lot of time and money to determine what kind of websites are appealing to different groups of people. I would have assumed that a graphically rich website such as Disney would be more appealing to younger students and therefore they would find information more easily on such as website. But, the findings of this article suggest that students were able to find the same amount of information on a graphically rich website as they were in website without many graphics. As I thought about this more and search the internet I discovered that websites with too many graphics makes it much harder for me to navigate. The thought behind more graphics is to capture the attention of the audience. But, the developer needs to walk a line between enough graphics to gain attention and not too many graphics which leads to a cluttered and hard to navigate website. I think that websites such as Google have the right idea in that they are very clean and free from the clutter. Nothing bothers me more then when I open a website and I am attacked by visuals and audio that really have nothing to do with the information I am searching for. I believe studies such as this one are important because we are still learning how to create a new form of media to present information to the world. Too much technology can be harmful to the purpose of the website. Websites are interesting in that they provide information in text form such as a book but also present information in a way that an artist presents an idea to the world. We navigate the internet as a virtual library of information. If websites are not easy to navigate then they become as useless as a textbook that has a lot of information that is not categorized properly.
