Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 2013, 6, 559-563
Published Online November 2013 (http://www.scirp.org/journal/jsea)
http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jsea.2013.611067
Open Access JSEA
559
Towards Developing Successful E-Government Websites
Osama Rababah1, Thair Hamtini2, Osama Harfoushi1, Bashar Al-Shboul1, Ruba Obiedat1,
Sahem Nawafleh3
1Department of Business Information Technology, King Abdullah II School for Information Technology, The University of Jordan,
Amman, Jordan; 2Department of Computer Information System, King Abdullah II School for Information Technology, The Univer-
sity of Jordan, Amman, Jordan; 3Department of Management Information System, University of Petra, Amman, Jordan .
Email: o.rababah@ju.edu.jo, thamtini@ju.edu.jo, o.harfoushi@ju.edu.jo, b.shboul@ju.edu.jo, r.obiedat@ju.edu.jo,
snawafleh@uop.edu.jo
Received September 30th, 2013; revised October 24th, 2013; accepted October 31st, 2013
Copyright © 2013 Osama Rababah et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
ABSTRACT
Quality is a key factor to ensuring success of e-government websites. Therefore, a definition for high-quality e-gov-
ernment website is required, as well as, an e-government system’s quality evaluation methodology. This paper iden tifies
quality attributes that are required to assess the quality of an e-government website, which should be consid ered by de-
velopers during the development of e-government applications. The primary goals are identifying, qualifying, catego-
rizing, and ranking these factors, and then defining the interrelations among these quality factors.
Keywords: Web Application Development; E-Government; Quality Evaluation
1. Introduction
An e-government website forms a significant part of the
government framework in advanced countries. It offers
services to people in a context of advanced information
technology, and new public management. Ensuring qual-
ity through website evalu ation arises from the fact that an
e-government website is the most important channel for
public services delivery, and citizen-government interac-
tion. Furthermore, the need to justify government in-
vestment that makes web-based service delivery possible
is yet another reason for website quality assurance.
Past researches show that the website evaluation de-
pends on multiple factors (e.g. download delay, errors in
pages, broken links, server response time) that can be
measured by web diagnostic [1,2]. Since government
sites are becoming increasingly complex, an integral
quantitative evaluation process regarding all relevant
quality characteristics is also a complex issue. This is
caused by the large amount of intervening characteristics,
and by the complex logic relationships among attributes
and characteristics. Besides, some relevant attributes to
evaluate cannot objectively be measured so that they
only can be included after a subjective measurement
made by expert evaluators [3].
Most of the official government websites only offer
basic information for visitors, without always paying
attention to the usability, accessibility, and content man-
agement of the website. For example, making govern-
ment services and infor mation on the e-govern ment web-
sites is not equal to the successful access by users; es-
pecially for persons with disability [4]. It is frequently
the case for people to visit a website which is poorly
structured, difficult to navigate and unfriendly for readers.
Some sites take a long time to download content, which
makes users become impatient and leave. Those sites are
often developed by people who have the perception that a
quality site is the one that demonstrates the latest multi-
media and animation effects [5].
2. Identifying Quality Factor
In this paper, the ISO/IEC 9126 was used as a base mo-
del to identify the basic e-government website quality
factors. The ISO/IEC 9126 standard was developed in
1991 to provide the framework for evaluating software
quality [6].
The model describes an internal and external software
quality. The internal software quality is developer ori-
ented derived from the product itself to satisfy end users’
requirements. On the other hand, the external software
quality provides an appreciation of the quality as seen
from a user’s perspective. Both the internal and external
software qualities are prescribed in six factors (i.e. func-