A Conceptual Organization for Websites Metrics and E-Government Websites

Abstract

E-government websites contain sensitive and important information where security and reliability are crucial. However, due to the large number of visitors, they are expected to be user friendly and provide services quickly. There are several methods to evaluate websites. Quality attributes of a website depend on several characteristics such as: its domain, type of information, and services it provides. This paper examines several e-government websites in Jordan for a comprehensive list of possible metrics, attributes and tools for evaluating websites. Websites and tools that can gather the described metrics are used to compare results. Results showed that such metrics have important information related to the overall properties and quality of those websites. This paper examines this list of metrics to evaluate e-government websites because such websites should have a combination of several high quality attributes that most other websites may not need to have. Similar to e-commerce websites, they need to provide high end quick secure services to a large number of users. Further, due to the type of sensitive data that they hold, they can be targets for a large number of hackers or invaders. Without the continuous evaluation and assessment for all required attributes such websites may fail catastrophically and cause a significant damage to data and reputation.