WEBSITE ANALYSIS REPORT 2011

Report Distributed October 31, 2011

Prepared for Mutual Investment Group

We appreciate the opportunity to analyze our competitors websites to gain knowledge in developing our own. As requested, we investigated both www.vanguard.com and

www.fool.com in order to create a simple, how-to site for aspiring investors with no experience. After our analysis, we felt the best way to illustrate the subject was by focusing on the following: TARGET AUDIENCE The website we will be designing should be geared towards individuals without any knowledge of portfolios, typically college students who have not been in the work force for long. Our website should contain simple steps to maximize their funds. The site must be easy to search through, user-friendly, and concise. We want our audience to ask questions comfortably and trust that we are giving them beneficial advice. In order to do so, we have made recommendations from the two websites mentioned above. Both sites have several aspects we would change when it comes to comprehensibility, such as: Less focus on college investments Vague instructions for beginners Wordy passages Cluttered sub section

However, there are some positives for beginning investors that should be incorporated in our website: Short, clear steps on how to investigate Accent colors for easy navigation Emphasized search engine Available information on stock market

Directions A concept we were especially impressed with was the lay out for the 13 Steps to Invest, shown in Figure 1. This shot, taken from fool.com, reiterates our point of readily available information for beginning investors. Since the Read the 13 Steps link is clear and highlighted by the green and beneath it is a How to Invest 101 subsection, college students should have no difficulty learning the basics of investment before they take action.

Figure 1: Easy to Read Steps

WRITING STYLE As for writing style, our website should be careful with its terminology, verbosity, and tone. We should set a middle ground for all audiences by focusing on the following: Vocabulary Vanguard.com has a formal tone. It uses many business-related terms, with which our target audience would be unfamiliar. For example it uses acronyms such as IRA, CD and ETF. One has to click on different links throughout the website to find out what these words mean. Vanguard.com also uses the term vanguarding, several times. Based on a survey we conducted, seventy-six percent of college students were unfamiliar with this term, which can prove problematic for this website. For the purpose of our website, we must assure the usage of vocabulary understood by a general audience. Concision Both websites have many links in general, located under the main tabs. While Vanguard.com is busy with long passages, the insight section includes shorter sentences, and simpler words. This is what our website should emulate to grasp the attention of a younger audience. Except for the insight section, the website lacks organization and needs to condense the information they are providing. While information is important, too much of it can distract the reader. Informality Fool.com , on the other hand, has an informal writing style. It focuses more on connecting with a younger audience rather than investments terms. Most sections include my to show personalization. The site breaks down topics in general steps, so one can easily learn how to

do invest. This makes the website comprehensible, which is important for a less knowledgeable audience. However, too much informality can lead to a loss of credibility for our website. Using terms like buzz and blogging can keep people from trusting our website, so these terms should be avoided. WEB DESIGN An attractive web design can also help our website gain a larger audience. A cluttered webpage can lose the attention of our target audience, who are college students with less time to sit and scroll through every page and every detail. By providing a basic outline for our website, we can grab the attention of our audience, which other competitive websites fail to do. The following are the design criteria we should emphasize on our new website: Color Color plays a vital role in the development of a website. Too much color can make it difficult for visitors to pay attention to the main concept, and too little color can cause them to lose interest in signing up. Both fool.com and vanguard.com use the basic white, gray, and beige colors, along with what is known as a pop color. The blue in fool.com and the maroon in vanguard.com serve as the websites pop colors, which helps contrast the page, without distracting the audience from its initial purpose. What we like better about fool.com, however, is the additional use of a bright green. Note in Figure 2, the green is used sparingly on the search button of the page, utilizing the color to highlight the most important categories on each page. As a new visitor to the website, which we assume our college students will be, it is important to instantly find a search tool that guides these individuals in the right direction.

Figure 2: Highlight colors

Repetition A repetitive focal point is also important for our web design. In the case of both fool.com and vanguard.com the focal points consist of the companys logo, which is smart advertisement.

If such a bookmark is not provided, the audience can easily feel as though they have navigated off the companys website, without making an attempt to return. In the two cases, however, we prefer the logo of vanguard.com because it is a simple graphic along with the companys name. Fool.com, on the other hand, has a joker as its focal point. While this does correlate to the companys name, it can also cause the website to lose some credibility. College students are looking for something they can trust, and a joker does not assure them of this. With so many mock websites on the internet, our audience might have a tendency to skip over a website with such a logo. Thus, we have to make sure our website looks approachable as well as credible. Alignment It is necessary that our company chooses a basic alignment for our website, whether it is left, middle, or center. Both fool.com and vanguard.com use alignment to place all their images and text in the middle or to the left, but there is still a cluttered look to the pages. Both pages have too many images or one large image that takes up most of the space on the website. Our company should keep some images, but we should also make sure it applies to the page itself and just works as visual aid rather than the main focus of the page. In any case, the use of white space on both websites is noteworthy. Without these white spaces, the websites would be harder to navigate through. Navigation There is a navigation bar provided in both fool.com and vanguard.com, and this helps the audience rollover each category and find what they are looking for. Our company should incorporate this idea for our website as well because it eases the individuals visit to our page. However, if we are providing these topics and subtopics, each page should be concise, with the least amount of information as possible. Otherwise, page division would be futile to our website. Something both websites fail to provide is a FAQ page, which might be a key component in helping college students understand our website. By providing basic definitions and a guide to the website itself, we can catch our audiences attention as well as become more helpful than our competitor websites. Font and Bolding As it is clear in Figure 3, fool.com emphasizes its main points by bolding and using the same font with different sizes. This is a stylistic attribute in the website that we as new web designers should also incorporate in our page.

Font is a basic, online model. Title of the page is the largest font and bolded. Figure 3: Bolding and font

Vanguard.com, on the other hand, has no basic font or bolding style. The shifting of these patterns makes the page confusing and unattractive (Figure 4). For our website, we must make sure that all the different pages look as though they belong to one website; unity in font and bolding helps create a stronger base.

Both fonts look about the same size, and there is an unnecessary color shift.

There is a use of random blue test, which is unseen everywhere else on the site.

Figure 4: Bolding and font (2)

CONCLUSION To ensure that newcomers can understand and invest in our company, we must design a website that is simple and easy to navigate. After our analysis of both fool.com and vanguard.com, we have concluded that our website must be informational as well as concise, considering our target audience. Taking the best features from both websites, as well as applying our own knowledge, will allow us to run a functional and productive website that is user-friendly and trustworthy. We hope that our recommendations will be a useful aid in the success of Mutual Investment Group.