We were given a task to think of a particular topic and then find a suitable website that could be used to give you information required. The chosen topic that we decided to research was ‘Sunbeds.’ The reason for choosing Sunbeds to research was because it’s something that everyone knows what sunbeds are and what they do.
I was in a group with 3 other people the first step was that we all had to individually find a website that we thought was reliable. I came across a website that looked genuine and started looking more in depth. I looked at simple things, such as when was the site last updated, does the site have any reliable sources? etc.
After having a quick look I decided that I really like the site and as another member of the group happened to come across the same site we all agreed to use it. The site we settled for was http://www.sunbedassociation.org.uk/
We then decided to evaluate the site and started discussing the good and bad points. The site had good use of colours, it had different hyperlinks for different things, it had tabs for useful information and news, which we thought, was good but whilst doing this we discovered that the site was not what it seemed.
The first thing that we noticed was that the statistics didn’t seem realistic so we checked to see if it had any sources and it did but the sourses used were ‘Source: Consumer Research on Sun tanning and Sunbeds, The Sunbed Association, UK, 1997, conducted by Taylor Nelson with a sample base of 6143 adults.’ Which was information from their own research.
I was in a group with 3 other people the first step was that we all had to individually find a website that we thought was reliable. I came across a website that looked genuine and started looking more in depth. I looked at simple things, such as when was the site last updated, does the site have any reliable sources? etc.
After having a quick look I decided that I really like the site and as another member of the group happened to come across the same site we all agreed to use it. The site we settled for was http://www.sunbedassociation.org.uk/
We then decided to evaluate the site and started discussing the good and bad points. The site had good use of colours, it had different hyperlinks for different things, it had tabs for useful information and news, which we thought, was good but whilst doing this we discovered that the site was not what it seemed.
The first thing that we noticed was that the statistics didn’t seem realistic so we checked to see if it had any sources and it did but the sourses used were ‘Source: Consumer Research on Sun tanning and Sunbeds, The Sunbed Association, UK, 1997, conducted by Taylor Nelson with a sample base of 6143 adults.’ Which was information from their own research.
The group eventually found a number of things wrong with the site. We clicked on a link that took us to a page with Dr Holick who had won 18 awards which seemed genuine but quickly realised that it was a biased site due to the fact that the name of the site was ‘UV Advantages’ although this was not a reliable the group decided that we would still present it to the class not letting on that it was a bad site to show how clever and realistic some sites look and how careful you have to be.
We also used something called http://www.easywhois.com/ and to my surprise the website came up this just goes to show that you cant believe everything you read on the Internet.
After completing this task I have learnt a lot about websites and how unworthy some of them really are. I enjoyed evaluating this website and feel more confident in what to look for in order to make sure the information im using from the internet is correct.
