Abstract:

Today, websites are considered to be important tools in research and education. The importance of successful design and development of an academic website with a more effective and a high degree of quality is increasing every day. Unfortunately, although the importance of an effective and high-quality academic website has been proven, user satisfaction and quality values have not been much considered by numerous academic websites. This will cause a huge negative effect on the popularity of the universities owning those websites. In addition, the quality of website home pages website is directly related to their usability and accessibility. In this paper, a number of evaluating criteria have been defined for websites of Iran’s top 14 universities (based on their educational and website rankings). Based on the mentioned criteria, home pages of these universities have been evaluated. The results of this work may be used by web developers, and for academic website designers, developers and administrators.

Keywords:

Website Evaluation, Iranian University Websites, Home Page.