Evaluating websites using a practical quality model.

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 thesis aims at proposing the website quality metrics and methods to measure the website interface and reputation quality factors. The evaluation metrics has a framework which can be viewed as a hierarchical tree with three 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 thesis is particularly concerned with two major quality characteristics: Aesthetics and Reputation, and also the several website measurable criteria (indicators) that now apply to almost all live websites. A website evaluation tool is provided by this study to measure website quality automatically. It includes a traversal unit, parsing unit, data metrics unit and user interface unit. Also some effective algorithms are used in each unit: data crawler, recursive, parser and data transmission. According to relative issues in previous research about website evaluation metrics, there are only a few of them that use same methods as this study to completely measure the website metrics, and highlight the entire website quality scores that meet the users’ requirements.