From Single-Site Web Applications to the Design of Web-Site-Families

Web applications, or web sites, are an important communication medium conveying information between organizations and the users of their web applications. To ensure a unique appearance of their web applications, organizations define standardized content, navigation and presentation requirements for web applications within their corporate identity. However, specialized information supplied by organizational units may not fit into this standardized scheme. Web site families try to overcome this situation by capturing the requirements necessary to fulfill the corporate identity, while at the same time providing the flexibility to specify requirements which are particular for individual organizational units. For this purpose, they rely on a hierarchical model in which common requirements for a family of web sites are captured. Those requirements may be extended, refined or re-structured within a concrete web site of an organizational unit as long as it adheres to the common requirements. In this paper the structure of web site families as well as consistency criteria that allow the flexible definition of families of web sites, are presented.