DOI: 10.4103/2320-0057.115870
Published: January 2013
Type: Perspective Paper
Abbas Doulani, Nadjla Hariri1, Ali Rashidi*
Department of Library and Information Science, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia,
1Department of Library and Information Science, Azad University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract:
The primary goal of this paper is to investigate various elements of websites and compare the quality of two groups of university website designs. The procedure for the quality assessment of website design involves various modules: Extracting components of websites, validating web pages, and identifying broken links. It continues with collecting the compared data of the existing statement of Iranian and British universities websites. The 5‑point scale has been chosen as evaluator tool. Different kinds of tools are used to examine above components. These tools include: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Link Checker, W3C markup validation service, web page analyzer, and website extractor. The W3C statistics findings show that Iranians university websites have high rate of errors compared with British university websites. These errors had been occurred in various levels of the websites: For example, HTML errors, broken links, server connectivity, image load error, and so on. It is clear that some of the websites donot followthe explicit website designing standards like W3Cs standards, and use nonprofessional designers whichcauseescalating the rate of website’s errors.