. Zahra Gholizadeh; . Ahmad Papi; . Hasan Ashrafi‑rizi; . Leila Shahrzadi; . Akbar Hasanzadeh
Volume 7, Issue 3 , May and June 2017, , Pages 1-6
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Nowadays websites are among the most important information sources used bymost people. With the spread of websites, especially those related to health issues, the number ...
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INTRODUCTION: Nowadays websites are among the most important information sources used bymost people. With the spread of websites, especially those related to health issues, the number oftheir visitors also increases, more than half of which are about nutritional information. Therefore,quality analysis of nutrition and diet therapy websites is of outmost importance. This study aims toevaluate the quality of Persian nutrition and diet therapy websites.METHODS: The current work is a survey study and uses an applied study method. The statisticalpopulation consists of 51 Persian websites about nutrition and diet therapy and census method wasused in order to study them. Data gathering was done using a checklist and with direct visit to eachwebsite. Descriptive and analytical statistics were used to analyse the gathered data with the helpof SPSS 21 software.RESULTS: Findings showed that content (66.7%), organization (82.4%), user friendlyinterfaces (52.9%) and total quality (70.6%) of most websites had a mediocre score while the designscore for most of the websites (70.6%) was acceptable also organizational websites had better design,organization and quality compared to private websites. The three websites with the highest generalquality score were the websites of “Novel Diet Therapy,” “Behsite” and “Dr. BehdadiPour” (jointly)and “Dr. Kermani” respectively. Also in the dimension of content the factors of goal, relevance andcredibility, in the dimension of design the factors of color, text and sound, pictures and videos, in thedimension of organization the factors of stability and indexing and in the dimension of user friendlinessthe factors of confidentiality, credibility and personalization had the highest scores.CONCLUSION: The results showed that the design score was higher than other scores. Also thegeneral quality score of the websites was mediocre and was not desirable. Also websites didn’t havesuitable scores in every factor. Since most people search the internet for nutritional and diet therapyinformation, the creators of these websites should endeavor to fix the shortcomings of their websitesand increase the quality of their websites in several different areas.
