Reflections
Reflections on Websites
Inequity: a site about the housing crisis
This website was built for a joint economics and rhetoic project between two classes (a senior economics seminar and a multimedia authorship class, I was in the latter). The two classes were divided into groups and created a website based on the economics member's seminar paper. Needlesstosay, my group's task was to build a website on the housing crisis. I named the site "Inequity" because of the term's relationship to finance and economics (e.g., the difference between the market value and unpaid mortgage balance on a house), as well as its lingual meaning of a lacking of standard or fairness. The logo emphasized this pun, as it is the government's symbol for "Fair" or "Equal Housing Opportunity" with a slash through the equals sign, to show how moral hazard and subprime mortgages (the focal points of the site) led to a loss of equity in both the houses and the banks.
Because the site was aimed at home owners who may have lost their home during the crisis, we wanted the site to be easy to follow and pleasant to look at, hence the use of the color blue which is often viewed as a "soothing" color and the FAQ-styled questions in the left column. This was to prevent the reader from getting lost or confused by how he or she got to that particular page. There was also a page dedicated to further reading and a glossary, in case any of the key terms weren't common knowledge to the user.