AN EXPLORATION OF WEB-SITE QUALITY DESIGN

This paper addresses the concern for effective web-site design by means of the conceptualization and empirical validation of a web-site quality assessment model. There is less research effort in examining the Internet technology applications in universities. That is why our research effort focused on web-site applications for university field. Our research goal was to define a theoretical and practical framework for measuring web-site quality. In this respect, the research was based on IS success theory, hypermedia design theory and qualitative exploratory studies. The research imbeds conclusions of anthropologic studies that offer important information for web-sites designers. One of the main conclusion of our empirical study is that when customizing a web-site to different cultures it is not enough to translate the text; the overall communication strategy and, as a result, the web-site design should be appropriate to the audience's cultural profile as well. Our research findings on universities web-sites served as the groundwork for expanding research on user satisfaction and quality assessment studies within a web-based environment. Such studies are important considering that the web-based systems are the common platform employed in today's organizations. The aim of the research was to provide a conceptual model for web-site quality evaluation. Partial results of the model validation are presented and concluding remarks are discussed.