An Empirical Research on Comprehensive Assessment of Goverment Websites

The aim of this paper is to develop comprehensive evaluation criteria for government websites and to apply it to a sample. Considering the difficulty of fuzzy synthetic evaluation method in calculation of the multiple factors and ignorance of the relationship among evaluating objects, a new weight evaluation process using an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach was introduced. This improved method for determination of weight of the evaluating indicators was applied in three websites assessment of China government entities. Results showed that it is important for websites to provide orientation information, and that website style be properly adapted to the government web environment and facilities be made available to users, and that website security and privacy concerns be addressed. Compared with the original evaluation method, the method was favorable for fuzzy synthetic evaluation when there were more than one evaluating objects and the evaluation results were more reasonable. The findings provide useful information to website assessment for improving e-government.