The Lottery for - Essay Example

The target audience is casual information seekers or researchers who want to have an entry level source of information that could lead to further research. The basic content for both sites, which is Shirley Jackson’s brief bio, list of works, and further reading, was easy to identify. Locating the information providers was an important step in understanding who created the pages.The author of “The Works of Shirley Jackson” is clearly identified (Hubbard, “Author: Kristen Hubbard”) and is a former student of English Literature at Virginia Commonwealth University.

It is hosted on the university’s server and would therefore have their approval for authenticity. The site “Shirley Jackson’s Bio” does not include information about the authors. Further research concluded that Laurence Hyman, son of Shirley Jackson, is the sponsor of the website. The type and amount of information on each site was looked at next. “Shirley Jackson’s Bio” shows the last update in 2009, as revealed in the copyright. The links on this site are active, but they do not point to other sites related to Jackson’s works and only lead to Jackson’s works available at Amazon.com. This static information reduces the sponsor’s need to update the pages frequently. . Both are well structured in a simple and easy-to-navigate layout.

Each site lists a brief biography of Jackson and a list of her works. “Shirley Jackson’s Bio” provides links to Amazon.com to her stories while “The Works of Shirley Jackson” offers a more complete list, including her short stories and essays. The language used in both sites is easy to understand, error free, and the content is factual information. The author of this paper had searched for papers and criticism on Jackson’s work using the Chadwyck Healy database prior to conducting this survey of websites.

While this helped to verify that the information at these two sites was accurate and consistent with information available elsewhere, it also led to the discovery that these sites provided only a brief background of Jackson’s works. “The Works of Shirley Jackson” is slightly superior by having a reasonably long list of over forty-five books and articles that offer critiques of Jackson’s work. Unfortunately, no useful links were provided on the page. In contrast, “Shirley Jackson’s Bio” does not give any such information at all and limits itself to a page of single line quotes from reviews of Jackson’s work.

Areas of Improvement Both sites are similar in content with the only difference being the type of links offered in each. “The Works of Shirley Jackson” is geared for the academic audience while “Shirley Jackson’s Bio” has a commercial tilt. The first improvement would be to merge these two targeted audiences and have links to further information available for both types of audiences. It must be remembered that these two types of audiences are not mutually exclusive and would benefit by this change.

As such, a second improvement would