A metric-based analysis of web sites in Serbia: first findings

• Authors: Zorica M. Mihajlovic;Nikos E. Mastorakis
• Venue: AIC'08 Proceedings of the 8th conference on Applied informatics and communications
• Year: 2008

Web engineering can be defined as a disciplined and systematic approach to development, deployment and maintenance of high-quality web applications. It borrows many principles, processes, methods and tools from software engineering and measurements and metrics are among them. The research on web metrics already done provides evidence that even simple HTML tag based metrics can be useful in evaluating quality attributes of web applications and in information retrieval. In this paper we study a number of web sites in Serbia in terms of HTML metrics gathered from the sites' web pages in order to compare the statistics of metrics with the results coming from a more advanced domain of the Web and presented in a previous work. We want to determine if our web pages are high-quality pages. The study covers web sites from educational and financial topics. Our analysis shows that the results obtained from web sites of banks in Serbia are very close to the results given in the previous work. The foreign banks in Serbia contribute to this mostly. In addition, our analysis finds out that schools of engineering of the University of Belgrade have the best web sites when the statistical features of HTML metrics are compared to those given in the previous work. A special tool for extracting metrics from HTML code automatically, named SMeterH, has been used in our analysis.