Web Structural Metrics Evaluation

Evaluating websites characteristics can take several methods. Some of those methods depend on users while others depend on the websites themselves. There are many software tools and related websites that measure websites attributes such as vulnerability, performance, navigability, structure, etc. This work focuses on studying website structural and related metrics that can be used as indicators of the complexity of the websites. Websites structural metrics can be also used to predict maintainability requirements. Examples of some structural metrics evaluated in this study include: size, complexity, and speed of page loading. While results showed that structural metrics are not good indicators for the popularity of the website, they may affect indirectly on the popularity through their effect on the performance or the usability of those websites. A tool is developed to collect navigability inlink and outlink metrics. We implemented several preprocessing steps to improve the performance of the developed tool in comparison to other navigability metrics or tools. Although it is not always true, however, a popular website needs to have a high inlink or backlink number where it indicates that such website is known by many users or other websites. On the other hand, outlinks give us indications of the structure of the website and do not necessary mean less or more popular website.