Evaluation of website presentation

To begin with we all gave a few ideas of what our topic could be, and then decided that ‘sun beds’ would be an interesting topic to research. We then typed into Google sun beds and browsed through the results the search engine gave us to find one that we were happy with. On the 4^th page we found http://www.sunbedassociation.org.uk. At the first look the site looked attractive and professional, with tabs which looked to contain useful information and links.

We then thought it would be a good idea to list down positive and negative points of the site. Some of the positives included good use of colour and images, good layout and useful hyperlinks. Whilst we were looking at these positive factors, especially the sources of information, we found that some of the sites information and facts were sourced by themselves. While looking further into this we found that one fact/statement was made by a Doctor. At first we found this shocking as the statement he made was claiming that Cancer Research UK were ‘hiding the truth’ about the good that sun beds can do and were saying that sun beds prevent many fatal diseases every year. We then found that the doctor (Dr Hollick) was a member of the ‘UV advantages’ group so this was then biased. 

After concluding that the site was completely biased we then used www.easywhois.com to see if the site was registered and it wasn’t. I think if this site was reliable it would be registered and would have correctly sourced information. I think this goes to show you can’t always believe what you find on the internet as some information may be very dangerous. 

When giving our presentation to the class we decided to present it as if we believed the information on the site, although we knew it was clearly wrong. I believe we presented it well as everyone in the group had a section to present. We didn’t tell the group of the negative points of the website (false sources) until we were asked the questions by them. I think to conclude our presentation was done well as some of the group were shocked by how real the site looked until we looked further into it to find the biased information.