AProposedFramework for Evaluating Websites of Sudan Government

Abstract

The Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations defined e-government as “the use of ICTs to more effectively and efficiently deliver government services to citizens and businesses. It is the application of ICT in government operations, achieving public ends by digital means”. Sudan government entities provide a wide range of information and services in their websites to fulfil their customers’ needs.In this research we gradually develop a framework for evaluating the websites of Sudan public authorities. The proposed framework consists of six evaluation criteria: Content; Design and Usability; Accessibility; Privacy; e-Service; and Citizen Engagement.The practical use of the framework is demonstrated by means of a case study, namely evaluating four websites of Sudan public authorities.The approach used in the case study includes the construction of an appropriate questionnaire for assessing the framework criteria. the case study provides some interesting results with regards to the shortcomings of Sudan public authority websites.Results indicate that most websites place emphasis firstly on the Accessibility and secondly on Design and Usability specially on page structure, and thirdly on the Content. In particular, all websites score very low in Privacy; e-Service; and Citizen Engagement criteria.