Week 4 Prompt

How do you judge the value of expertise on the Web? Does it differ from your notion of expertise in face-to-face settings? Why or why not?

I consider the source. Is the information produced by an entity that I consider to be credible offline? If so, there will be an initial tendency to accredit traditional expertise with online expertise. However, my initial assumptions can be easily compromised if the content is disorganized, not factual, or disjointed. Speaking of content, it is much easier as a consumer to evaluate expertise if I am intimately familiar with the subject. Take aviation, I can immediately discern the expertise of content reported by general news services opposed to aviation-specific news outlets. As for subjects that I am less familiar, such as health and finance, I tend to rely on the expertise of others when judging expertise. I hope that I am not influenced by superficial elements (e.g., site design) and make informed decisions about site content. That is my hope, but according to a Consumer's Report study on web site credibility found that the majority of consumers are persuaded by a site's overall appeal.

The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.