ABSTRACT

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate and evaluate qualitative measures for improving the website design of various universities in India. The website of each university is scanned using W3C guidelines. The parameters such as download time, website size, broken links, etc., are considered in the procedure. Different kinds of tools are used to examine the components of website. These tools include: W3C Link Checker, W3C Markup Validation Service, Webpage Analyzer and Website Extractor. The W3C Link checker accepts URL address of Web page and parses each and every hyperlink to find broken links in the page. The W3C Markup Validation Service finds the errors regarding HTML tags’ usage errors, properties of Web page and standards of the Web page mentioned by W3C Consortium. The Webpage Analyzer finds the number of objects used in each Web page, Web page size, downloading time etc., The Website Extractor extracts URL addresses of all Web pages of the Website. The errors of each web site are grouped into major and minor errors. A set of qualitative measures are identified based on these errors. The qualitative measures are evaluated in 5-point scale. The area of the website which requires improvement in website design can be identified from the value of 5-point scale.