Michael Marassa
Web Evaluation
After reading through the various
sources and examples of rubrics, I felt the Rutledge article and Schrock
guidelines offered the most insight into what a web evaluation should look
like. I will speak briefly about each article and what aspects I
plan to incorporate into my evaluation.
The Steve Rutledge article (a former UIUC grad student)
broke web site evaluation into 5 key categories:
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Contents
-
Graphics
-
Design
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Navigation
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Typography
These five categories I feel are concise and accurately address
what viewers need to evaluate in a good web site. The contents
of
the web site looks at 4 W's: who created it, where is it
located (URL), when was it last updated, and what is it about.
The graphics portion of his evaluation addresses length of load
time (becoming less of an issue as access speeds improve), apporpriateness
of graphics, how well these images capture the interest of the viewer,
and how these pictures guide the reader through the page. In terms
of design, this portion looks at consistency from page to page on
a site. This, I felt, was not such an important evaluand for a web
site. It might ease load time and make navigation slightly easier.
His next area was just that: navigation. This evaluates how
easy or difficult is is for a viewer to find the information needed.
Are menus clearly labeled? Do links offer more than one location?
Are pages handicapped accessible? The last area of evaluation is
typography.
Rutledge emphasizes the way the text is presented to the reader (font,
italics, bold, color) and how easily it can be understood. With exception
to design consistency, I feel these others aspects are all important to
my web evaluation rubric
The Kathy Schrock article addresses many of these same
issues (graphics, the 4 W's, navigability, etc), using different terms
sometimes to refer to them. For instance, she defines efficiency
as the time it takes to receive all of the page's information. But,
her pages also go a little further and find some areas that too are important.
The first area is called authority. This area not only wants
to know who created the page, but what are their credentials. What
makes them an expert to publish this page? The next area is bias.
What rationale does this author have for creating this page: is this purely
informative, persuasive, commerically driven? A third area is citations:
does the page contain links that verify the information. Lastly,
the Schrock article addresses quantity. Does the web site
offer the user enough information to fulfill needs, and if it doesn't,
does it contain links as other resources to help the viewer continue
research.
With these two resources in hand, here
is the web evaluation I have created.
last updated 6.9.2000