TO: Dania Ammar, English 1110 Instructor

FROM: Dano (Savannah) Reynolds

DATE: September 9, 2019

SUBJECT: Environmental Website Comparison

In today’s climate environmentally friendly practices and products focused on preserving our
environment have gone mainstream. Many people have adopted better recycling habits or
even more to the extreme have started using “Zero Waste” products in their homes and daily
lives. There are many foundations focused on helping people to adopt more sustainable
practices and also bringing more awareness to the impact we as individuals can have on the
environment around us.

Focus

In the cases of Treehugger.com and Greenpeace.org, both are focused on encouraging their
online communities to interact with the world around them in a more eco-conscious way. They
highlight the issues around climate change and environmental news through frequent articles
and blog posts. Keeping their communities informed and raising awareness towards what
public can do about these issues is a very prominent goal of these websites.

There are similar elements that the websites share that encourage frequent engagement and
continue to build the community around them. These similarities include:

 Blogs are posted frequently bringing attention to recent global issues and important
news and better new practices
 There is a donation page that encourages users to contribute to good causes that
support the ideals the websites are trying to convey.
 A pop up to join the websites newsletters comes out as soon as you enter the websites
offering easy access to their content.

Community engagement is the biggest goal of the websites. Not only to sell eco-friendly
products but to also teach people to be respectful to the world around them and to live
responsibly and eco-consciously.

Treehugger.com

Treehugger.com mainly focuses on the global and national news around environmental issues
and eco-conscious living. The main page features many different articles pertaining to diverse
subjects such as; design, clean eating, eco-friendly products, and the laws and political news
around environmental initiatives. There seems to be more emphasis on keeping people
informed about good causes rather than to sell a product or get people to join groups. There is
a lot of advertising on the website, some of which encourages donations. The advertising is
however limited to environmental groups and eco-friendly products, so the focus is always kept
on the environment. The website does seem a bit cluttered but still maintains a clean layout
and doesn’t have an obtrusive color scheme.

Greenpeace.org

Greenpeace.org has much more of a “Take action” approach upon entering the website. There
are impactful images showing the people that are involved in the “Greenpeace” community and
of damaged environments. The website features more ways to interact with the organization
itself, involving the user more in their mission to better maintain our environment. There are
more features on what the company has achieved and it’s goals for getting people concerned
about the state of our planet. On the main page there are links to see how companies and
political leaders the user supports score in terms of eco-friendly practices. This website reaches
out to the user to “take action” and get involved in taking care of the environment. The
opportunities for donating to the company are numerous and focus on how there is no outside
influence other than the clear goal to save the planet.

Effectiveness and Impact

Greenpeace.org is definitely a great example of community engagement and of passion for the
environment. It appeals to the involved environmentalist and people looking to learn more
about what it means to be saving our planet through action and change in daily habits. In the
case of building a website centered around the eco-conscious community it would be good to
emulate this website. The clean layout, clear mission statement and way of engaging the user
are qualities the builder of an environmentally focused website should look out for while
figuring out the elements it would like to include.

Reflection

With the similar goal of this discourse community to better inform the people around them to
be better to our planet the SLO that I focused on was “Analysis of the website content in
relation to the discourse community”. The websites were very similar and so there was a lot of
smaller areas to focus on in terms of differences and trying to see the difference in their goals.
It does take a different skill to see not only what is similar with the websites but also what
differences can make them individually more effective than the other. Comparisons are not
something I would consider to be my strong point, but this paper helped me to learn how to
break down the categories that need to be addressed. With the next Major Writing Assignment,
I hope I can incorporate these new skills of analysis and comparison.

Attached are the two websites mentioned in this memo: https://www.greenpeace.org,

https://www.treehugger.com