Microsoft Word 2007 ichrie conference Proceedings Final-Final 06-06-07. doc

EVALUATING DESTINATION WEBSITES 
Kasavana (2002) suggested that creating a set of criteria for evaluating a website’s effectiveness is difficult. 
Never-the-less website evaluation has been extensively studied and many research frameworks and models have 
been proposed (Lu, Lu & Zhang, 2002). Early website studies focused on analyzing site content and features. 
Content analysis is a technique for gathering and analyzing website content; content can be words, phrases, 
sentences, paragraphs, pictures, symbols, or ideas (Cooper & Schindler, 2003). Among the early website content 
analysis studies is a hotel website study by Murphy, Forrest, Wotring and Brymer (1996). In 1999, Countryman, as 
cited by Morrison et al. (2004) used content analysis to evaluate websites of 50 official US state tourism boards 
while content analysis was used by Benckendorff and Black (2000) in a study of 16 websites hosted by regional 
tourism authorities in Australia. Similarly, Blum and Fallon (2002) used content analysis in their study of 53 

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