Chick.com: Chick Publications

Chick Publications is a Christian religious website, promoting Christian views. The main purpose of the website is to sell Christian related products such as Books and E-books. They also however attack other religions and science on their website, and promote publications which enforce these ideals.

Visual aspects

The website employs mostly soft colors in its layout. These range from light browns and greens for header text and some background, to slighter stronger colors such as  black and blue for the main reading text. All color use is designed to give a nice friendly feeling towards the viewer, probably counter to the sometimes extreme views the website truly contains.

General Layout

Here is the homepage, as you can see we have the title of the website “Chick publications” written in bold font in the top left hand corner, followed by a catch line explaining the websites content and intent on the right hand side- “Publishing gospel tracts and equipping Christians for evangelism for over forty years.” We then see 3 tabs for the use of the website in other languages.

Below this we have a banner containing head shots of various people. These people are meant to be the  intended audience of this website (Christians). Its worthy to note that these people are of varying ages and ethnicity's, showing the website is aiming its products at a broad range of culturally different people, as long as they all have the common religion of Christianity.  According to Goatly (2006) “Products become a badge of membership.” (Goatly P192) I believe this website is guaranteed a stream of revenue from their intended Christian audience, since these products may be associated with being a good Christian.

On the left we have a list of links, easily organised to allow the viewer to scan the websites features. These links are in three sections "Things to do", "Products" and "Information". According to Wysocki P130 “page composers can arrange the shape of text to achieve different ends” These categories and links allow easy access to all of the websites features, and most importantly- products.

In the centre we have an advertisement of the main product of the website which is "Chick Cartoon Tracts", which seem to be Christian themed cartoon strips, aimed at children. These may be downloaded online, or ordered in large quantity in hard copy. The intended audience of these Tracts appear to be children,  and perhaps even "confused" christian adults.  The advertisement shows the cover of the cartoon, as well as a synopsis showing the theme of the cartoon.

The general layout of this homepage is simple and designed to draw the viewer into the various avenues of the website.
According to Wysocki (2004) - “Someone composing a text that has visual materiality has to pick and choose among available strategies to build a text that attracts a desired audience, is understandable to that audience, and moves it towards the ends desired by the composer.” (Wysocki, P126)

The website is very effective to this end. One finds themselves being constantly  redirected to some form of product the website offers; usually an E Book or hard copy book.

Other Features

On the right we have an embedded YouTube video. According toWysocki (2004)  “Page and screen composers can make their arguments with shapes, colour, photographs, drawings and paintings, charts and graphs, animations, visual transitions, video and sound.” (Wysocki P131) The video no doubt changes on a daily basis, but is most probably exclusively christian themed, and is often endorsing a book, the synopsis of which appears below the video.

Product

Further down featured centrally, we have a section called "Products", showing  more advertisements for books, e books and cartoon tracts. The sole aim of this website seems to be the selling of Christian literature.

Even further below we have the section "Information" which is the home page's most interesting section. Here we have Tables featuring links to christian literature, that attacks other religions such Islam, Mormonism, Freemasonry, Catholicism, and also attacks the science of evolution.

Ideology

The obvious ideology behind this website is that Christianity and the bible is correct, and all other religions are false, and certain aspects of science are untruthful and based on a wider scientific conspiracy.
 The website is dedicated to the selling of resource material to achieve these ends,  the eventual converting of more people to the religion, and the persecution of others whom they stand against. The soft nature of the websites appearance hides this ideology to a degree, but it is easy to interpret once you have seen the content of the publications for sale, and the subsequent articles in support of this literature.

References

Goatly, A. (2006). Critical reading and writing. London: Routledge.

Wysocki, 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 it: An introduction to analysing
texts and textual practices, pp. 123 – 163, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Eribaum.