By Johnny
The Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT) is an informal international coalition of grassroots groups that campaign against animal fur trading.
Their website’s purpose is to promote animals’ rights, organise protests, raise funds and call on people to sign their petition. And the audiences are from anyone who is interested in animals’ preservation to those real fur products buyers.
I’m going to review this site from the following four aspects: first impressions, writing, content and navigation.
First impressions:
Whether a website succeeds or not is greatly dependent on its primary impression. CAFT site at first seems friendly but too simple. The front page is divided into three columns:
On the left side, a pop out menu is composed of 10 buttons from “Campaign Materials” to “Contact Us”.
In the middle is the text part, including two pieces of news stories related to CAFT and the brief introduction of the coalition. By using 10.5 point Georgia font and putting less than 50 words in each paragraph, the articles are very easily readable.
And on the right side, there is a protest list which demonstrates the most significant stores they campaign against, from Harrods to Joseph. Audiences can enter the series of reports by clicking the pictures.
The colour scheme of the site is purple, which is bright, obvious but too garish. Even worse, some red headlines have been put on purple background, which makes colour blind people difficult to read.
In addition, some of the pictures are animals without their skins. That is in favour of attracting people’s attention and awaking their sympathy, but obviously too scary for a front page image.
As Jacob suggests, a website only has a few seconds to capture a visitor or customer, so it has to tell audiences why it is different from other similar sites.
To this end this front page is not good enough to distinct itself from other sites. We cannot expect this site happens to be very aesthetically pleasing but it is still visually appealing by its target audience.
Writing:
According to Jacob, Web pages have to employ scannable text. CAFT site is doing well to this point.
For most of the articles in this site, the headlines and page titles are simple and straightforward; sub-headings and an inverted pyramid writing style has been applied, and each paragraph has only one theme (in fact the whole site has one theme—fur trading is evil).
Especially on the “Become a Fur Detective” page, the use of bullet point, colour (pink for real, blue for fake) and chart make their ideas clear and easy to follow.
Statistical evidences are used very often, and CAFT referenced almost all the sources of the statistics by listing outbound hypertext links. This promoted the credibility of the site dramatically.
However the links lists are often put at the bottom of the pages rather than after the statistics which can be very inconvenient to audiences who are interested in figures.
In terms of language, this site is not objective enough.
In order to muster more people to boycott stores that sell products containing real fur, some of the descriptions are rather sensational. Especially when reporting stores such as Harrods, the language is obviously negative in tone.
Content:
As Jacob states, a clear-cut theme is vital important to a website. CAFT site has a distinct, easily recognisable purpose. And the purpose has been reinforced throughout the website.
This site concentrates on promoting animals’ rights and protesting the UK-based department stores which sell products containing real fur.
So the articles here are mainly related to reporting their campaigns and achievements, listing the fact that animals are suffering and asking for support.
From the positive standpoint, most of the stories are original and unique –as they are written by campaigners and recorded the protests in first person. The pages have been structured to facilitate scanning.
It provides an email service announcing recent major updates to registered members. And the entire website has no advertising, which makes the pages very clean.
However this site is insufficient in the range and variety of the subjects, especially compared with www.ifrc.org (International Red Cross site) which is also a public service site and has a similar purpose to CAFT.
the Red Cross site
On the one hand, it is not updated frequent enough, as the front page story happened on 27 September. (Red Cross site is uploaded on a daily basis.)
On the other hand, the use of multimedia is far from enough, only provides some youtube links to their editing free campaign video. (www.ifrc.org has a specific category: Media Center, where listed a variety of correlative multimedia sources.)
Navigation:
Generally, CAFT site is easy to navigate around.
It place a “home” button on every pages’ left side and make it link to the front page. Most of their portfolios are arranged in chronological order, making readers convenient to find what they want.
It is worth mentioning that it contains a specific ‘links’ category, to forward audiences to other animal rights promotion or public service sites that may interest their audiences .
These elements make the site have a consistent feel and appearance.
However it’s still not perfect. Jacob suggests a website should “never have a link that points right back to the current page”, but the “home” button is still vivid on the homepage.
All the links here will be opened in the same window. This is a bit annoying, especially when there is no “back” button to bring you right back to the last page if you miss something or want to compare this page to the previous works.
