Page 187 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

176 • Sport, Media and Society

site maps, these features indicate Web sites too large for users to navigate without
additional assistance or the anticipation of users whose time is short.

Web Conventions and House Style

Consistency in design across a Web site has become a convention that enables the
establishment of a house style. This is achieved through the repeated use of graphical
elements, for example, the use of sidebars on every page to highlight and formalise
possible navigation choices. Among these, ‘About us’ and ‘Contact us’ sidebars have
become a standardised feature on most institutional Web sites. These features lend
an institution legitimacy in the ephemeral world of the Web. Boardman (2005: 18)
argued that the ‘house style is crucial in branding the company that has created it’.
Domain name branding (making the URL of the site as similar as possible to the
name of the organisation) and the use of a logo throughout the site is part of the aim
of lending validity to the organisation by creating a corporate identity and market
recognition. Boardman (2005: 25) argued that if logos are also hyperlinks, the user
can explore ‘exactly how this extra validity is being offered’.

Text on the Internet

A great deal of Web content is still the written word, and text style and font are
important signifying elements. The absence of upper case for the initial letters of
title words is ‘a very pervasive typographical feature that has taken hold’, according
to Boardman (2005: 18). Boardman argued that this was a result of the infl uence of
email and SMS text messaging and their corresponding ‘subconscious contextual as-
sumption that the messages need to be sent quickly, and that the monitoring of typo-
graphical patterns militates against this’ (Boardman 2005: 18).
Font choice is equally significant. Boardman (2005) argued that fonts are closely

linked to register, that is, the degree of formality of the text, determined by social

convention. Serif fonts are identifiable by flourishes at the ends of the letter strokes,

such as Times New Roman, and were the standard for centuries. Sans serif fonts are

a more modern, nineteenth-century development and have no flourishes (like Arial).
Word processing software gave home and small business users access to proportion-
ally spaced typefaces, like those used in publishing, so they no longer needed to use
the monospaced fonts, like Courier, which were developed because of the physical
limitations of the typewriter. As a result, Courier is now associated with a retro look.
A serif font at a size of around 12 point is seen now as the de facto standard for print
publishing, and this has extended to software tools to create Web pages. The use of
sans serif fonts is therefore often a deliberate move away from the default serif font
and indicates a more contemporary, modern feel, as opposed to the established and
traditional connotations of serif fonts.