Analysis and Recommendations for Wisdom Investments Website

Wisdom Investments is developing a website for its new department that focuses on inexperienced investors. Both The Motley Fool, at Fool.com and The Vanguard Group, at Vanguard.com, have sections on their websites dedicated to new investors. We researched and analyzed The Motley Fools and The Vanguard Groups websites to gain an understanding of how they are targeting the same audience and, therefore, how we can make our website more effective. After analyzing The Motley Fools website, at Fool.com and The Vanguard Group, at Vanguard.com, we were able to come up with the following recommendations: Content for Target Market Include non-technical information. For inexperienced investors, explanations that are too technical may turn the user away. A good example of this would be Fool.coms explanation of common stock. A useful feature from Fool.com was the use of a glossary of terms to help with any new or technical terms. Use simple and clear examples. It is important to have real life examples that users can relate to. Since our target market is mostly college students, the examples need to be simple yet informative, to reinforce the importance of investing. On Fool.com, an excellent example was shown with the story of Bianca and Patrice. Writing Style Make tone humorous and light. Most college students will respond better to this writing style. This style makes the reader feel at ease while learning about the complicated world of finances. Use a simple, non-formal vocabulary. College students do not want to read information that is stiff and extremely formal. Information will be easier to understand if a simple vocabulary is chosen. Visual Design Use white space effectively. Information on the page can be found easily by cutting down on the clutter of information and advertisements. Fool.com was extremely cluttered. The eye wanders all over the page searching for something to focus on.Vanguard.com used a lot of white space making the information very easy to read. Limit the amount of links to allow easier navigation for our users. If a user can not navigate around the inexperienced investor section of our website, they will go somewhere else. We feel it is

important to have specific titles for easier navigation. The Vanguard Groups website was difficult to navigate. They use non-descriptive and vague titles. We hope that this analysis proves useful to Wisdom Investments as you construct your own website.

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