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. To overcome this situation, we introduce the concept of web site families, capable of capturing the requirements necessary to fulfill the corporate identity, while at the same time providing the flexibility to specify distinct requirements of organizational units. Web site families 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 we will define the structure of web site families and how consistency criteria derived from the common requirements of organizations allow the flexible definition of families of web sites.