WebMD - Better information. Better health. - 0 views
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heidi owens on 02 Sep 10Overview: WebMD is a website designed to provide very general and basic information (not necessarily medical advice) for patients about health problems and healthy eating. As far as credibility goes, I do not doubt much of the information provided, but if you are looking for real answers to medical questions, this is not your website. Fortunately all content is free. It would be a good site to look at to find out what a certain disease is, what the symptoms are and how to go about dealing with it (drug names, etc.) and when to call a doctor. I think overall it is a good site for basic medical information but I would not rely on it to solve any medical problem, as its' purpose is not clinical based. Design Summary: From a first look, there is a lot going on in this webpage. Pictures are flashing back and forth, ads are flashing on the sides of the page and there is a lot of different colors and different sizes of texts. It is fairly organized however and is easy to find what you are looking for relatively quickly. I had trouble finding a list of sponsors and all I could find was a statement on the information tab which said, "We allow third parties to provide funding for WebMD to independently create information about certain topics within a specified health category". Also the ads on the site were mostly for drug companies, which cause some bias. The site worked the same in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Finding contact information was easy enough (at the very bottom of the page in small text) but I could not find any means of contacting them except for email.