Assessing the Communicative Effectiveness of Websites

Abstract

Websites are the main mechanisms used by companies and institutions to communicate their activities to the world. For this reason, it is critical to ensure that the message being conveyed by the website is exactly the one intended by the institution. However, analyzing what is being communicated is complex given the semantic and contextual factors that intervene. To face this concern, this paper describes a method that makes it easier for a human expert to evaluate the communicative effectiveness of a website. Since, in most websites, textual content is used to explain the institution’s main mission and activities to visitors, the method heavily relies on a quantitative analysis of the textual web content. Once this analysis finishes, the result is represented by a semantic network that takes account of the conceptual structure underlying the website. In addition to presenting the method, we describe a web application prototype that implements it, as well as we evaluate it with a meaningful case study.