In "Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments," Hocks discusses the importance of transparency when creating digital and visual documents. This means that the writer should design the document in a way that their audience will understand easily by using common and established conventions.
To demonstrate the importance of transparency as it pertains to online documents, I searched Google for the "Worst Websites of 2012." I came across a site for Don Swanson Racing school. While this website was obviously made on a low budget and probably not by professional web designers, it goes against a lot of established conventions for websites.
For example, there is a small banner at the top that includes the links for the different pages on the site; the links are small enough that viewers might not even notice that they are links. The only consistency between pages is this single banner and a small footer all the way at the bottom of the page. Each page requires a lot of scrolling because there is a lot of random image content as well as inconsistent text styles, sizes, and colors. It's also confusing because whenever you click on the "home" link from a different page on the site, it opens up in a new tab. I've included a screenshot of the home page, but check out the link and see what I mean. Websites need to follow certain standards (within reason) in order for audiences to process them easily.
http://donswansonracingschool.com/index.htm