The Study Of Government Portal Website Information Architecture And Evaluation

Governments have made a huge progress with comprehensive promoting E-government construction in the wave of information technology. Government informationization and E-government enhance unceasingly, and make an important contribution to social and economic development. As the center of the E-government, government portal websites play a significant role. Although they have obtained great achievements, the information service they provide is still not satisfactory. The problems exist in the following aspects: lack of standardization, low online serviceability, poor sharing of government information resources, inaccessibility. It is important for governments to design an excellent government website to which users can easily and convenient get an access to scan and acquire information resources.The aims of Information Architecture (IA) are to succeed in discovering and organizing information. As websites become more sophisticated, heterogeneous and dispersed, users always lose the direction in the net. People need IA to manage and have an access to information.Now, we have to face up to this fact that there is a huge gap between ideal and reality. It is crucial for websites designers to improve users' satisfaction, organize information resources scientifically and seek faster and more conveniently. So, the paper tries constructing an accessible and user-friendly government portal website by taking the advantage of Information Architecture.This paper includes five sections. The first section is introduction. It introduces the purpose and the significance of this study. In the second section, it reviews the history research progress and development of IA, and summarizes the original government websites and development. The third section analyses the structural of Web IA including the organization systems, navigation systems, labeling systems and search systems. The next section discusses the current domestic and foreign methods of government websites evaluation. The paper adopts the Analytic Hierarchy Process to form the government website evaluating model. Thus the author puts forward a new method on the basis of IA to evaluate the eleven government portal websites in Zhejiang Province. Finally it draws a conclusion and points out innovations and disadvantages of this thesis.The research conclusion of the paper demonstrates that the website owners can design an accessible, understandable and friendly government portal website by applying the Web Information Architecture including organization systems, navigation systems, labeling systems and searching systems. It is necessary and feasible to evaluate government portal websites based on IA. Bringing the Information Architecture into government portal websites is positive in enriching users' experience and improving the website management.