How to Evaluate Investments in Website Quality Within eGovernment? Exploring the Webmaster's Perception of Benefits

For most organizations today, the website is an important channel for interacting with users. Within an eGovernment context, we find a large and inhomogeneous group of users and the quality in websites is, therefore, of particular importance. Facing this fact, many organizations spend lot of resources on development and quality improvements. In order to investigate perceptions of benefits-driven public sector websites, the present paper draws on both qualitative and quantitative data, represented by interviews and an online survey conducted among webmasters and business managers. The aim of combing qualitative and quantitative data is to provide complementary analysis. The findings show that user satisfaction is found to be the most important, followed by efficiency, effectiveness and the branding effect. The paper concludes that the website increase efficiency and effectiveness within an organization and is a great opportunity for marketing purposes, such as stimulating the branding effect. Recommendations for future research contributions are provided.

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