Newcastle University

Andy King and Florian Stahl, two MSc in Ebusiness and IS students, working with their consultancy project supervisor, Dr Savvas Papagiannidis, produced an excellent piece of research work that was not only accepted by the 2010 Annual London Business Research Conference, but also won the best paper award (the details of the paper follow). The student participation in the conference was funded by the Business School.

Using the Internet Archive for measuring web site change: A methodology by Andrew King , Florian Stahl and Savvas Papagiannidis

As Internet technologies advance and design trends evolve, so does web site design. With the increasing significance that web sites have for all organisations defining and measuring change over time can have important practical implications for marketing purposes. The aim of this paper was to analyse the development of web sites over time, measuring which elements change and how much.

The element list was compiled based on the human computer interaction literature. A system was then built to collect and analyse web sites using the design elements list. When it came to the data collection, we used the Wayback Machine available as part of the Internet Archive. Our longitudinal analysis spanned a decade of web site development.

The paper discusses the methodology adopted and the early findings of our research.