Abstract:
One of the main strands in e-government research focuses on evaluating the government website. Previous studies have developed several models of government website evaluation. Unfortunately, that rich exploration of the government's website study seems to be ignored in the Indonesian e-government literature. Against that backdrop, this study formulated a synthetic model of government' website evaluation based on previous models developed by other scholars. It deployed them to assess ten local government websites (Municipality/Regency) in East Kalimantan. The model consists of two broad dimensions: technical and democratic deliberation. On the technical dimension, by using the SortSite 5.3.5. software, it is found that the local governments' website performs relatively low on accessibility and errors on four metrics evaluated by the software. On the other side, on the democratic deliberation dimension, local government websites in East Kalimantan have performed relatively well in fulfilling the minimum of the democratic principle. We call it minimum because the websites have provided the user with basic information and several channels to interact with the officials.
Machine summary:
Many studies on the Indonesian government's website stressed evaluating Indonesian e-government stages (Dahlan, 2008; Nurdin, Stockdale & Scheepers, 2012; Yunita & Aprianto, 2018), and if there is research on government website evaluation, they have mainly used a single set of metrics/model or used national or ministerial regulations as evaluation variables and have not developed any particular models for evaluating government' websites (Dahlan, 2010; Hermana & Silfianti, 2011; Kurniawan, Rakhmawati, Abadi, Zuhri & Sugiyanto, 2017; Prahono & Elidjen, 2015; Sulistiyo K, Negara & Firdaus, 2008; Wahid, 2008), while others have focused on the role of e-government in public administration reform agenda (Prahono & Elidjen, 2015), and Indonesian citizen acceptance on e-government service (Rokhman, 201 I).
For example, the study of a company's websites evaluation might focus on the utilization of websites to promote their brand (Crosato, Domenech & Liberati, 2021; Simoes, Singh & Perin, 2015; Thorleuchter & Van den Poel, 2012), while for university's websites, the questions revolve around the role of university's website in delivering services for the stakeholders, such as students, parents, industry, and for university staff (Faizal & Prasetio, 2020; Farashi, Bashirian & Zareian, 2020; Firozjah, Dizaji & Hafezi, 2019; Gharibeniazi, Kamran & Ghaebi, 2015; Niazi, Kamran & Ghaebi, 2020; Sherafat & Davoodi, 2018) For a government website evaluation study, the questions are more or less the same.
According to International Standards Organization's (ISO) definition, usability is the extent to which citizens can use a website to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified e-government service context (Venkatesh, Hoehle & Aljafari, 2014; Verkijika & De Wet, 2018).