Web Site Public Relations: How Corporations Build and Maintain R ...

Implications of an Experience-Centered Perspective

A focus on the Web site experience has important implications for communication research. If the object of analysis is not the text, as it exists independent of audiences, but the lived experience of using and interacting with a Web site, it becomes essential to understand the participants and the nature of their experiences. Methodologically, it follows that textual or content analysis should be replaced with the observation and analysis of people’s experiences using Web sites and the meanings they create in the process. Such a research methodology that uses both quantitative and qualitative data to tap into Web site users’ experiences and interpretations, is developed and used in this research project, as explained in chapter 4.

Ignoring the Web site user can lead to misleading conclusions in Web site analysis. For example, a researcher analyzing online media rooms used the number of content categories available in each media room as a measure of media room elaboration (Callison, 2003). Media room elaboration was considered a positive aspect in this study and provided a basis for making inferences about the overall quality of online media rooms. The problem with this operationalization is that it completely ignores the Web site user. The overall elaboration and quality of a media room are determined not only by the quantity of available content but also by the means of navigating and accessing this content. The latter aspect was completely ignored in Callison’s study, illustrating a major drawback of content analysis as a method for studying Web sites.