Analysis of Vidhya Babu’s Home Page
Web designer: Vidhya L. Babu. Web address: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Woods/9843/index.html

Foreword
I chose to analyse Vidhya L. Babu’s Home Page since I thought it would be interesting to analyse an Indian person’s web site. I found the site by searching on google for Indian web sites. Vidhya has made her web site through Yahoo Geocities (http://geocities.yahoo.com/) which is a free web site provider. Althought it is free there is a catch whereby the owner is required to have compulsory advertisements on the site. Yahoo Geocities do offer a lot of pre-excisting templates so that people who are not familiar with web design and language such as html or Java can manage to make web sites relatively easy. It is a person’s own choice however if they want to use pre-existing templates or build one with the help of the program geocities provide. I believe that Vidhya has done some of the design by herself and then resorted to some parts that are pre-made, which leads me to the question: What is an own made web site and what is a pre-existing web site? This is a complex issue to analyse since where do we draw the line between what is own made and what is pre-made, and how do we really know that Vidhya herself has made her own home page and not a third party. I argue that there is not a totally own made web site since there are always some parts in web sites that are pre-made or not made by the web site owner itself, even programs like Dreamviewer and Notepad are in ways pre–existing web site programs.

Action
Since Vidhya has made the action to make her own web site it shows that she is relatively wealthy and can afford the technology that needs to be used, as well as being able to access to the internet.

Concept
The concept of Vidhya’s web site is Indian culture. It seems to me that she wants to exhibit her Indian life and culture to other people. On the front page Vidhya has links to pages that contain Indian culture such as: “Dance” (Bharatha Natyam), “Carnatic Music” (South Indian classical), “Musical Instrument” (Veena), “Mehndi” (Body art), “Rangoli” (Art), “Cooking” (Indian Recipes) “Glossary of ingredients”, “Family album”, “Dance album”, “Mehdi album” and “Wedding album” “View my guest book” and “Sign my guest book”. It also has links to pages outside her site: “Architechture of Sri Siva Vishnu Temple – Maryland in USA”, “Animation Factory”, “This Background by Stormi”. Further down the front page there are icons with links to downloading the tools she has used to build her web site.

Audience Type
The audience type that this website appeals to is probobly Indian people or people who might find the Indian culture exotic and interesting and also family and friends. Vidhya writes on her site that she lives in New York with her husband and son, which indicates that her web site is a way for her to keep in contact with family and friends who might still live in India, as well as to keep up with Indian culture and a link to her country of origin.This is also shown with the link: “Join proud indian ring”. A ring means when some people who run personal home pages join together according to common interests and build web rings. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_ring)

Page design
This site consists of one home page with information about Vidhya herself and links to other pages on her site that include photos of her and her family, her interests and more. The page design has strong colours on black background. The text is in red, yellow and blue and makes the page of very high contrast. The text and images are centralised on the page and give the feeling of amateur design.

Writing style
The writing style is simple and easy to understand however she does write in another language as well, which makes it a little bit confusing since it does not say what language it is but in my understanding it is Indian.

Visuals
The moment you get into this website a popup window appears and the Explorer User Prompt says: ”Please enter your name for a personalised welcome”. This part is a bit annoying and feels like going into a persons’ home territory (which might be her intention though as well as keeping track of who is visiting her page.). After this procedure there is a big welcome to the home page that says: Hi! Anonymous GOOD EVENING! WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE, since I didn’t want to give my name. The first impression that catches the eye when looking at this web site is the contrast of black background and bright colours. The bright yellow, red and blue coloured text against the black background as well as the moving visual images like an icon, text and a flag tend to make me feel that she is shouting to get attention since this is how I tend to perceive these strong colours and moving visuals. However, she is from India and that might be a reason for her to choose these particular colours since colour conventions might be different in India to the conventions that I am used to that come from Sweden and Australia.

Navigation
Vidhya has not got a site map but it is relatively easy to navigate around between Vidhya’s pages however it feels a bit annoying and scary when a pop up window appears saying: “Bye” everytime I click on a link, leave or just visit other pages even within her own site. Overall choice of material The overall choice of her material is well thougt out and informative since there is a lot of information about the Indian culture which I find interesting. The most appealing part is the food receipes page which contains around a hundred recipes for Indian food.

Opportunities for feedback
Vidhya has had a lot of positive feedback for her website. The feedback is in what she calls the “Awards page” as well as in her “Sign my guestbook”.

Connection with other media
She has links to other web sites on such subjects as: architecture, animation factory and web page background. I cannot find any other connetctions to other media on her site.