More and more people are using the Internet. And when these poople want information about a company's products or services, they often 90 to the company's Web site. In a study of the home pages of Fortune 500 . companies, 13 tactors were deemed critical to quality. Those tactors, and the survey results, are shown below: 10. Indication of last update date Yes, 17%; 1. Use of meta tags (e.g., keywords used by search engines) Yes. 11. A privacy policy Yes, 53%; no, 47%. 12. Presence of a search engine Yes, 59%;n0,41% 13. Translation to multiple languages Yes, 11%;n0,89% 70%; no, 30% 2. Meaningful home page title Yes, 97%; no, 3% 3. Unique domain name Yes, 91%; no, 9% 4. Search engine site registration 97% (average) The corporations are doing well on most factors, but they need 5. Server reliability 99% (average) improvement on the last five. 6. Average speed of loading (seconds) 28k, 19.3; 56K,10.9;T1,2.6sec. The list is a handy reference other organizations can use to bench. 7. Average number of bad links .40 mark their existing home pages to see where improvements are neeted 8. Average number of spelling errors . 16 or to develop effective home pages. 9. Visibility of contact information Yes, 74%; no, 26% Question Give one reason for the importance of each factoc. Source: Based on Nabil Tamimi, Murli Raaan, and Rose Sebastianelil, "Genchmarking the Home Pages of 'Fortune 500 ' Companies." Reprinted with perwission from Qual ity Progress 92000 American Society for Quality. Na furthes. distribution allowed without permission