A Content Analysis for Website Usefulness Evaluation: Utilizing Text Mining Technique

Abstract

With the increasing influence of online media, company websites have become important communication channels between companies and customers. Companies use their websites as a marketing tool for a variety of purposes, including enhancing their image and selling products or services. Many researchers have examined the criteria, methods, and tools for website evaluation, but most have focused on usability. Prior content analyses have focused not on text content but on website components, an approach likely to produce subjective evaluations. This study attempts to objectively evaluate company websites by utilizing text mining. We analyze the usefulness of company websites by presenting visualized outputs from a business perspective, allowing practitioners to easily understand the results of the website evaluation and use them in decision making. To demonstrate our method empirically, we selected a company with a number of affiliates in Korea and analyzed the text content of their websites to assess their usefulness using natural language processing and graphics packages in R. Practitioners can easily employ our objective evaluation method, and researchers can use it to gain a new perspective on website evaluation.