A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis on Website Design Change: Case study on animal welfare organization homepage

Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Machin & Mayr, 2012) primarily focuses on revealing the ideologies and power interests underlying texts and other elements like visual images. Website homepage design becomes a novel digital genre with its distinctive features in content, form, and function, as well as its evolution and change. Comparing earlier and current versions of a website homepage within the past twenty years via a Web archive (http://web.archive.org/), this study begins with a diachronic comparison in terms of images, language and layout of the website design for an animal welfare organization, Animal Asia Foundation, in order to develop a critical awareness. It is shown that the homepages have changed from vertical to horizontal orientation, and from a brochure-like style with many texts to a flash format with less text but more larger photographs, and from few uses of personal pronouns to more frequent together with imperative mood. The factors likely initiating website design changes are technology advances, as reader’s reading habit and expectation changes, and more important as their perception (sympathy and empathy in particular) on animal welfare issue motivated. Thus, MCDA proves its applicability and feasibility in revealing underlying power, ideology, social changes and practices (Bhatia, 2004) in the website design change.