Web sites have been extensively used to provide information to consumers. While practitioners and researchers have proposed different criteria for effective Web site design based on common sense, intuition, and rules-of-thumb, effective Web site design focusing on the quality of the information it provides has rarely been studied. In this research, we propose a framework and develop an instrument to measure the information quality of individual or personal Web sites. The theoretical foundation of this research is the information quality framework. The proposed framework and instrument were tested in an individual or personal Web site context.

This paper presents a framework for measuring information quality on personal websites. Information on these websites can include the author's resume, autobiography, interests and works. The paper proposes 4 major information quality categories which include; intrinsic information quality (accuracy and relevancy of content and hyperlinks), contextual information quality (provision of author's information), representational information quality (organisation and consistency of content) and accessibility information quality (usefulness of the navigational tools provided).

A questionnaire (with 41 questions) was developed based on these categories and administered to students to subjectively evaluate the information quality of personal websites. The results from factor analysis showed that the intrinsic and representational information quality categories tend to merge with each other and seven other concepts were not loaded to any factor. This provides an indication that their framework and qusetionnaire may require refinement in future work. Some of the questions in the questionnaire might be applicable in subjectively assessing the information quality of blogs which can also be classified as a personal website for an individual or organisation. Unfortunately, the authors have not provided a sample of their developed questionnaire in their paper.

• Intrinsic, Contextual, Representational & Accessibility Information Quality
• Semiotics
• Information structuring
• Cronbach's Alpha
• VARIMAX Rotation