Web site design benchmarking within industry groups

For corporations engaged in e‐commerce, the Web serves as their primary interface with customers. Consequently, quality Web site design is a critical success factor for corporations with an e‐commerce strategy. However, no comprehensive and coherent set of evaluation criteria exists that corporations and researchers can use to examine Web sites. This paper fills this gap by proposing Web site evaluation criteria and applying these criteria to different industry groups within Korea. Based on the literature survey, six categories of Web site evaluation criteria are defined: business function; corporation credibility; contents reliability; Web site attractiveness; systematic structure; and navigation. Using these criteria, Web sites in 12 industries were evaluated to determine if there are differences in Web site design between industries. The objective was to determine differences between industries which may provide information for benchmarking purposes. The results show significant differences in the design of Web sites across these different industry groups.