Child Centeredness on The Public Sector Websites

In the era that the use of the internet very widened, websites which are one of the important corporate communication tools of brands, take a critical role. Public institutions present their services and works to the public through their websites. Children are an important target group for the services provided by the state. Public institutions are obliged to express themselves not only to adults but also to children. For this purpose, some public institutions include special contents for children on their websites. Websites published by the public sector for children directly serve this purpose. Internet usage patterns and behaviors of children are different than adults. In this regard, children websites developed by public institutions must include certain usability and child-centered features. Children websites of public institutions are evaluated according to usability and child-centeredness criteria within the scope of this work. The main legislative, executive and judicial institutions of the Republic of Turkey and 100 official websites belonging to these institutions are involved in this research by determining sitemaps, and 9 children websites were analyzed by the content analysis method. The results of the study revealed in detail the status of the child-centered websites of public institutions in terms of evaluation criteria.

Keywords

public sector, website, child centeredness