A framework for evaluating academic website's quality from students' perspective

As organizations have become aware of the strategic importance of websites, the trend to use websites for various purposes has increased in different domains such as education, health, government and business. However, organizations seeking to obtain benefits from their websites need to create and maintain websites that are successful in supporting the interaction and communication of the organization with their users. The main goal of this Thesis project was to design an improved website quality evaluation framework for academic websites from students’ perspective. For this purpose, an extensive study of the literature on existing quality evaluation models, essential website success factors and criteria was made to identify necessary quality factors, sub factors and criteria. A new and improved quality evaluation framework consisting of five high-level quality factors (Content, Usability, Reliability, Efficiency and Functionality), hierarchically arranged into sub quality factors and criteria was designed. The proposed framework was applied on a case study academic website (TU-Delft University website) to assess its effectiveness and at the same time to evaluate the quality of the website. It is observed from the results of the case study conducted to evaluate the proposed framework, that the new framework has a better construct of quality factors and sub factors as compared to the ISO 9126-1 evaluation model. However, further study should be conducted on some of the sub factors such as identity, authority, multiple language support and functionality. The results of evaluating the TU-Delft website showed that the website in general has a good quality of reliability and efficiency characteristics, while having moderate quality in its content, usability and functionality features.Web Information SystemsComputer Science/Information ArchitectureElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc