Identifying & Prioritizing the Factors Influencing on Website Evaluation, A Content Analysis of Literature

In recent years، continuing growth in technology and strengthening competitiveness through the business environment have led websites to be a key instrument to communicate with stakeholders. Therefore، website effectiveness is considered as a vital factor to attract and retain customers. It is worthy to mention that despite of investing heavily in establishing websites by most of organizations، they do not attain their initial objectives، and the performance of websites is not satisfying. One of the critical reasons of such failures is the lack of proper website evaluation framework for practical use. In this vein، many studies have been conducted to identify the critical factors influencing on the website performance or quality ranging from Internet marketing researches to information systems design and human–computer interactions. This study identifies the factors، which must be taken into account in evaluating a website، using content analysis of 130 relative articles published between 1995 to 2011. We used Shannon Entropy to prioritize the most cited factors and their measurements based on computing the entropy of information and frequencies of addressing them in these articles. Based on the obtained results، we proposed a conceptual framework including 6 major factors: information quality، visual appearance، usability، customer support، technical features، and vendor''s specific quality and reputation.