A MODEL FOR WEBSITE QUALITY EVALUATION - A PRACTICAL APPROACH

The rapid growth of web applications increases the need to evaluate web applications quantitatively. In the past few years some valuable works like Web QEM (Web Quality Evaluation Method) tried to objectively evaluate the web applications. However, still weighting web attributes which is one step of evaluation of web applications is completely subjective, depending mostly on expert’s judgments. Many of the existing website evaluation methods and criteria for evaluating website quality are not able to sufficiently assess the performance and quality of a website, and most of them focus on usability and accessibility. This paper aims at proposing the website quality into two levels. The first level is composed of five quality characteristics: Aesthetics, Ease of Use, Multimedia, Rich Content and Reputation. The second level breaks down the first level quality characteristics into sub-characteristics and the third level further breaks down the second level sub-characteristics into measurable criteria. This paper is particularly concerned with two major quality characteristics: Aesthetics and Reputation, and also the several website measurable criteria that now apply to almost all live websites. Finally, paper describes thoroughly an evaluation process.