The website being analysed in this website analyses report is http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/, the homepage. This website represents World of Warcraft (WoW) a large online game with millions of players. This website is directed at both people who play the game, and to people who may be interested in joining. The advertising is on a very high scale, and it will be described how so further on.




Upon entering this website the viewer is confronted with a lot of flashy and eye catching movements all over the screen. It is almost difficult to decide what to click on first. Immediately upon entering, the first thing people who weren’t there for a direct purpose would focus on is the large changing screen at the top middle of their page. It shows the newest creations of the company who own this game, Blizzard Entertainment, and its content is often changed weekly. It is advertising to the viewer, using word and animation in an elegant way. According to Wysoki with many animations "there are bright colours and broad shapes we associate with children's TV cartoons" (Wysoki, 2004, page 136), this becomes evident to the viewer because all over this page there is different coloured pictures and animations. Most of these contain strange images of out worldly creatures and inventions. The screen in the top middle of the page is strategically placed there because most people will be inclined to see it first.



Directly to the right of that screen, are a list of brilliantly coloured eye catching options. The top one and in a larger box than the others, is an offer of a 10day free trial of the game. The picture consists of a box of the game to the left, and a female with glowing hands positioned i n the middle. This is Blizzards offer to anyone who may be interested in trying out this game for free, and is it clearly a successful way to entice newcomers into eventually buying the game, so it has to be in a prime spot also. According to Wysoki “composers use technical illustrations rather than words or photographs to demonstrate objects more abstractly.” (Wysoki, 2004, page 134). This is seen to be true as well, because Blizzard did not choose to just have a picture of the box under their 10 day trial offer, they included a picture of a character from the game using magic. This makes it seem more interesting, and would certainly result in more people trying it.



On the left side of the screen shows a navigation point around their site. This is the key to their website without knowing the way in and out of it already. It shows where to enter the account section, the game guide, the workshop, media, forums and so on. It is clear and to the point, written in small yellow text. It is kept in a smaller font than the advertising material because it is just a map around their site, and if the viewer isn’t interested in the game then they wouldn’t need to know their way around the site. It’s not advertising material, so they keep in a small but easy to read manor. According to Wysoki “Letters have shape because of their typefaces. Because type faces are a major visual strategy for a text’s composers to signal the genre into which the text is to fit” (Wysoki, 2004, page 127.) This is evident because the site map is in the same font and colour of all the larger captions for the advertising, but this is just a smaller size. This is like that because this is just a list of things, so they don’t need to make it in the same large size, it can be kept smaller and less eye catching.

When scrolled down a small way, on the right hand side of the page is a promotion that they are offering. This is directed at people who own the game, and want to get a friend to join. It offers great rewards (in game) including faster leveling, exclusive mounts to ride and more abilities. It also gets the player who recruited his friend a free month of game play. This is shown with a picture of two characters from the game flying through the sky riding upon the mount that is rewarded. This is the second biggest piece of advertising on the entire page. Its main contents is the picture, with a small list of the rewards. According to Wycoki “animations are often used in explanations of technical processes because the process can be shown abstractly” (Wycoki, 2004, page 136.) This shows the end result of the process, a mount that is desirable for many players of the game, which is also a link to the recruit a friend page that has more information. This is a strong way for blizzard to advertise, and it has made many players recruit their friends, that mount became very popular in the game, many people using it. This shows that many people did get their friends to play.

However, when compared to the home website for Guild wars (www.guildwars.com/), a rival game to WoW, there was a significant difference. The largest image on this page was at the top and in the middle is said “War in Kryta” with two people in light robes facing two people with masked faces in black robes. It is a link to their newest expansion page, and it is so large because the game creator wants to hype up the expansion. Once scrolled down from that large image, the page is actually very bare. There was a small list “latest headlines“, none of them eye catching or interesting. This site had a lot of blank space, and very little that would catch a persons eye. This website seems small and rather dark compared to the bright and vibrant worldofwarcraft.com. It almost seems like the Guild wars website just doesn’t have very much to say about their game.

Finally, after looking back at the WoW page, it became very clear what game looked more interesting, and fun to play. Simply with all these bright colours and images, world of warcraft seemed to be a more attractive game than guild wars, which had very little advertising on its page and a lot of empty space. The actual game of guild wars might be a lot more exciting than world of warcraft, but by the look of the websites, warcraft seem to know what they are doing on the advertising scene that the guild wars creators.

References: Wysoki, A.F. (2004). The Multiple Media of Texts: How onscreen and paper texts incorporate words, images and other media. In C. Bazerman and P. Prior, (Eds.) What writing does and how it does: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practises, pp. 123-163, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum.