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.