Genre analysis; multimodal discourse analysis; university website; institutional discourse; advertising education; language metafunctions

The study provides an insight into the ways in which universities employ multimodal elements to advertise the academic experience, research-informed teaching and research results, thus attracting prospective students. Anchored in the methodology of genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis related to Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, the research focuses on the contribution of images - photographs and pictures - to the ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings conveyed by the websites to prospective students. The contrastive analysis revealed significant differences both in the form and the function of images between the British/American and the Czech sub-corpora suggesting the relevance of the social and cultural contexts for the realization and the establishment of genres. The development of web genres also seems to be significantly shaped by the progress of internet technologies and their growing affordances.