Towards a quality model for Web sites

Evaluating web sites quality requires appropriate evaluation criteria. Many of existing criteria are not easy to measure and require methods such as heuristic evaluations, or/and empirical usability tests. This paper aims at defining a quality model and a set of characteristics that can be measured in an automated fashion, relating internal and external quality factors and giving clues about potential problems. The first step in the quality assessment process is an automatic check of the source code, followed by manual evaluation, possibly supported by an appropriate user panel. As many existing tools can perform some analysis (mainly accessibility issues are considered), the general architecture will be based upon a conceptual model of the site/page, and the tools will export their output to a Quality Data Base, which is the basis for subsequent actions (checking, reporting test results, etc.).