EVALUATING WEB PAGES Five Criteria for Evaluating Web Pages

Five Criteria for Evaluating Web Pages

Introduction

The two websites chosen for evaluation and comparison are 'www.stevesims.com' and 'www.theukwebdesigncompany.com'. Both websites related to a common field of web designing. Furthermore, both web sites are UK based and cater to their target customers in UK as well as all over the world. Both companies “The UK Web Designing Company” and “Steve Sims, Sims Designs UK” established in 2003. Therefore, both companies can be compared and will have equivalent potential as per their time since existence and markets they are catering to, which include domestic as well as international markets. The five criteria for evaluation of these websites would be accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage (Metzger & Flanagin, 2008, Pp. 166)

Analysis

Several methods to measure readability of text (on web pages) been proposed so far, and it might be possible to use one of them. Such methods generally consider various features of textual content such as sentence length, word length or average number of syllables. Although, they have been successfully used for many document genres such as legal documents and school textbooks, they are not effective enough to be directly applied for web pages. This is because web pages consist of not only text but also of tables, images, sound, and videos of other elements that affect their comprehensibility. In addition, it is possible to make the content of pages more understandable for users just by improving design or layout. Therefore, in order to measure comprehensibility of web pages, analyzing only extracted text is insufficient. However, on the other hand, there are no ready methods to be used for exhaustive analysis of the whole content of web pages including images, videos, layout and so on from the comprehensibility viewpoint (Chall & Dale, 1995, Pp. 11-58). The approach ...