1. Background

The personal homepage is an interesting and intriguing phenomenon. It has evolved quickly and combines many elements, which is why the personal homepage is considered to be the first uniquely digital genre (Dillon and Gushrowski (2000)). Yet, even though the personal homepage meets many of the criteria of a genre, most of us still do not know exactly how to define this new and emergent genre. Both the content and the form of personal homepages are still rather optional which still causes the personal homepage to be very much under development.

Setting up a personal homepage has become increasingly popular and more and more people decide to create their own space in cyberspace. Thus the popularity of the World Wide Web has created a need for more research to understand how communication through the web works and to learn more about its interactive capabilities.

Today there are numerous specialists who advise anyone interested in web-design on how to design an "outstanding website". Other specialists provide technical information needed for creating websites. According to Herring (2003) [1] these specialists take on a prescriptive role which in itself is useful but not adequate enough to explain how web communication takes place. We need to analyse the content of the Web closely and critically in order to broaden our understanding of the personal homepage and at the same time move beyond prescriptivism. This can be achieved through Content Analysis methods, which have already been used extensively to analyse media communication. Lately these methods have been applied to the World Wide Web (e.g. Bates and Lu, (1997), Karlsson (2002)) to identify patterns of structure and meaning in multimedia discourse and images.

Content Analysis is an umbrella term for a range of related methodologies including discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, semiotics, iconography and link analysis among others. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are carried out to discover the meaning expressed through text (and through images) to increase our understanding of the communication via the Web.

Most research of the Web conducted through Content Analysis has focused on images and the layout of various web pages. There is almost no literature that analyses the written text of Web pages, which is why detailed textual analyses of the discourse used in homepages are needed to provide a more comprehensive view of how web users communicate via the homepage. This is the main concern of this article.