Prior theory stipulates that three dimensions can explain the appearance of electronic media genres: content,rnform, and function. This paper reports an analysis of subjective groupings of U.S. State government homepagesrnto determine if the three dimensions do in fact underlie the visual appearance of this genre. Homepage imagesrnwere collected-one per state per year for all available states for 1998-2001?from a publicly available archivernof Web sites. Subjects sorted the images for each year into groups according to perceived similarities.rnMultidimensional scaling was used to identify dimensions that account for the groupings. The empiricallyrnderived dimensions were examined in light of theoretical expectations. A four-dimensional solution was foundrnto fit the data, the first three dimensions of which correspond to content, form, and function. Directions forrnfuture research are discussed.
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