The website I probably visit the most often is Buzzfeed. I used to be on it 24/7 but I have decided to cut down, you can only take so many quizzes in a day. The point of Buzzfeed is to create a community to share news, great memes, celebrity gossip, and so on. The first thing you see is the cover photo for the current breaking news, followed by the headline. This is what the designer probably thought was the most important thing for the audience to see first. Breaking news should come before all other news. On the top of the page, there is a white bar starting with the Buzzfeed logo and followed by News, Videos, Quizzes, Tasty, More, and a search bar. Because of the order, you can still tell that the designer thinks News should be promoted before all other kinds of articles, plus the audience is most likely visiting the site for its news.
The main color on the page is white, paired with black, blue, yellow, red, and pink. The white is used to help all the pictures stand out and doesn’t make the page appear too busy. Buzzfeed employed the use of the basic colors red, blue, pink, and yellow. These colors stand out against the white background. The red is used for the logos, yellow for tags like LOL and OMG, blue for the different categories, and pink for what’s trending. Each of these can be easily found at the top of the page and are distinguished from one another due to their color.
Buzzfeed is organized in order to encourage its audience to read multiple articles in a row. This is similar to how Youtube’s homepage is organized since it wants its audience to watch multiple videos consecutively, as addressed in a previous blog post by Bauers. All the articles are in a list with the most recent one being the largest. The list continues as you scroll down and all the pictures with their titles are aligned to the left, making it simple enough to read. On the right is a smaller list of the top trending articles numbered from one to fifteen, obviously trying to get readers to be interested. All of the articles are placed in pretty close proximity to each other so you can’t view one title without seeing the one below or above it.
Buzzfeed does employ the use of ads however, they are not as prominent as the articles. There is one at the top of the page above the breaking news, and the rest are integrated into their articles. This shows that the designer did not see them as a homepage necessity.
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Works Cited
Ball, Cheryl E., et al. “2: How Does Rhetoric Work in Multimodal Projects?” Writer/Designer, 2nd ed., Bedford Books/St. Martin’s, 2017.