Quality characteristics and attributes for academic Web sites

LUIS OLSINA; DANIELA GODOY; GUILLERMO LAFUENTE; GUSTAVO ROSSI

Toronto

Workshop; Web Engineering Workshop at the 8th World Wide Web Conference (WWW'99); 1999

In this communication, we outline over a hundred and twenty quality characteristics and attributes for academic site domain. The primary goal is to classify and categorize elements that might be part of a quantitative evaluation, comparison, and ranking process. To this end, we use the Web-site Quality Evaluation Method as an useful tool to assess the artifact quality in the operational phase of a WIS lifecycle. In order to effectively select characteristics we should consider different users´ needs and behaviors. Hence, it was observed three different audiences regarding academic visitor profiles: current and prospective students, academic personnel, and research sponsors. Particularly, the aim of this work is to show the quality requirement tree regarding standardized characteristics, taking into account a current and prospective students´ view. In addition, a hierarchical and descriptive specification framework for attributes and partial results are discussed. We used an automated tool to collect and analyze data for attributes like broken links, page size, image title, among others. Finally, concluding remarks are presented.