Website Quality Evaluation Methodology Universal Star: 1st point – “Content”

Abstract

The Internet continues to grow at a fast pace with over 1.5 billion websites in 2019 as compared with only one in 1991. The emergence of enormous websites of various complexities and types makes assessing the quality of these sites a vastly important, difficult and complicated task. With this concern, the current paper proposes a novel approach for website assessment by developing a new Website Quality Evaluation Methodology Universal Star (WQEMUS) with a theoretical and empirical basis. It became possible through the employment of the  grounded  theory  methodology  that  enables  relevant  concepts  to  emerge  from  data. To improve the reliability and validity of the findings, an extensive literature review, in-depth and qualitative interviews, and a user evaluation survey were conducted and associated together. In this way, the study presents the results of the selection and categorization of generic quality attributes for WQEMUS with a three-tier structure, consisting of top-level quality criteria, sub-criteria and indicators. These quality dimensions are grounded on a combination of subjective and objective indicators. Consequently, WQEMUS becomes capable of estimating a wide range of different websites irrespective of domain affiliation and services they provide, including Web 3.0 sites.