Steam vs. HDFin

Our this week´s assignment was to find two webpages: one trustworthy and one untrustworthy site which relate to group´s theme, lifestyle. After finding these two pages, we were assigned to discuss their features and in the end to write five arguments for the trustworthy website, and five arguments against the untrustworthy one.

We decided to discuss these two webpages: 

1. http://store.steampowered.com/  (trustworthy)

2. http://www.hdfin.com/items.php (untrustworthy)

Steampowered.com is a platform for game distribution, multiplaying, and communication between players. Steam offers both free and chargeable games, and in order to buy games and communicate in the community users are required to create an account. Steam has about 70% market share in the distribution of digital PC -games, so it has a remarkable role on the gaming market.

Five arguments for STEAM

1. The webpage is trustworthy, because the main links lead the user to reasonable pages, the search -function is easy to use, and the information is logically organized in certain places such as the list of genres, latest offers, most popular games, etc...The structure is clear and smart.
2. Site functions in multiple languages, this makes it a lot easier to use the page. Steam.com also has existed for quite a long time on this line of business, over ten years, and over the years it has gained even more than 125 million active users.
3. Webpage clearly informs the user about its developer and the characteristics of it. The developer of Steam is a professional, informal gaming- and entertainment corporation called Valve, which consists of a group of professional game creators.
4. Steam does not require much information of the user in order to join the community. The Steam download is completely free, and it´s available to various operating systems. It also takes extremely small space on the hard disc when downloaded (1,5Mt).
5. Webpage has a professional appearance: the texts are written correctly (grammar, formality), color scheme is simple blue, there are no irrelevant adverts, the privacy protection -practices are accessible, as order contract and other juridical information.

Hdfin.com is a webpage for streaming movies and series online for free. Its idea is very similar to Netflix. Besides viewing movies users aren´t only able to rate them and participate in different discussions on the discussion forum, but also download their own content, such as pictures and videos, to the website. In order to view content, users are required to create an account to the page, and attach their email to their profile. 

Five arguments against HDFIN

1. The webpage is untrustworthy, because most of the links on the website don´t work properly, nor do most of the movies. Also, often wen a link is clicked open, suddenly there pops one or various windows on the screen with some kind of adverts. This is called a pop-up advertisement.
2. Webpage´s appearance is unprofessional and unconvincing. It looks cheap and unreliable. There are many irrelevant advertisements on the main page already. There´s no logical structure, the pictures are bad quality and the whole site is unclear in general.
3. On the homepage there´s a message from the administrator of the site (HDFin/HDLord). It´s lacking a clear aim, and sounds very odd. It´s written in very rash and emotional manner: full of colloquial language and grammar errors. This gives an extremely unprofessional impression of the website, and refers to amateurism of the administrator.
4. The webpage does not mention, how have the movies ended up there. Generally, the content is very suspicious and dysfunctional and is most probably illegally downloaded. Hdfin is run by advertisements, and this contains a security risk to users.
    
5. There´s a 'FAQ', 'Terms', and 'contact us' -page but they open only in english even if Finnish was set as a language. 'Terms' -page is out of reasonable order, it´s constructed very disorganized, and it does not give the viewer a sensation of trust in the content and the way page functions.

S.P.