Evaluating the Internal Quality Aspects of Universities’ Websites in Punjab

Objectives: In this globalized competitive world, websites have become so important that an academic institution cannot think of surviving for a long time without an appropriately designed and engineered website. Therefore, the key objective of this study was to evaluate the internal quality aspects of some selected universities’ websites of Punjab, northern state of India. Methods/Statistical Analysis: For the sample selection of universities, stratified random sampling was used by categorizing all the universities’ websites of Punjab into four groups such as State, Private, Deemed, or Central universities on the basis of their status. For the measurement of website’s internal quality attributes such as load time, total size of web page, requests per content type during loading, HTML check errors and broken links which cannot be perceived by users otherwise, three web testing tools such as W3C validator, Web Page Test and Selenium were used in this study. Findings: The results obtained in this study shows that the efficiency/performance of Lovely University’ website is the best among the websites of other universities considered in this study. This particular website which represents a private university takes the least download time. Minimum number of HTML errors and broken links were found on this website as compared to other websites. It shows that web designers and administration of private universities are utmost concerned regarding their website quality. Application/Improvements: By improving the internal quality parameters of websites considered in this study, website’s visibility in search engines can be improved which is an imperative aspect for high traffic rank.