Website evaluation questionnaire: Development of a research-based tool for evaluating informational websites

Abstract

Online questionnaires are frequently used to monitor the quality of municipal and other governmental websites. In the present situation, many government organizations seem to reinvent the wheel and develop their own questionnaire. This leads to the undesirable situation that website quality is often assessed with instruments that are not comparable with each other and are not empirically validated. This article presents a generic Website Evaluation Questionnaire (WEQ) for the evaluation of informational websites. The WEQ was developed on the basis of the literature on usability and user satisfaction and was tested and revised in several rounds. This has resulted in a reliable questionnaire measuring clearly distinct quality dimensions of informational websites. The WEQ can be used by governmental organizations for evaluating their websites and for benchmarking their results against each other. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.