Organizational Websites Need Developmental Guidelines

Researchers have made suggestions about the content of websites and tools have been developed to help in producing and maintaining them, but there is little commonality between the structure and content of the material presented on the many thousands of websites worldwide. Observing this led us to ask four questions: (1) What advantage does an organization hope to achieve when developing and maintaining a website? (2) Can these factors be used to develop a list of contents for an effective website? (3) Are some of these essential to a particular industry of website and why? (4) What advantages would the users and website communities receive from an effort to develop prototype standards for websites? To answer these, we inspected websites of corporations, governmental offices, and not-for-profit organizations, including various sized ones. We concluded that there is a need to produce guidelines. We identified portions of sites that are excellent and might be recommended as guidelines for developing sites and felt that an effort could make websites easier for users to understand and navigate to complete their transactions, though the content could depend on the website’s purpose, the organization’s industry type, and its mode of doing business.