This is the author created version of a work that has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication by World Wide Web Journal, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. It incorporates referee’s comments but changes resulting from the publishing process, such as copyediting, structural formatting, may not be reflected in this document. The published version is available at:

The Web Evolution study [2] investigates the issues affecting the web user interface through understanding the evolution of the web. A Web robot [1] was used to capture data for the study. This re-port provides instructions for using the code, and for customising the code for future work. Human Centred Web 2Web Evolution The Web Evolution project is investigating into the issues that cause the lag between the introduction of standards and recommendations and when they were adopted by the developers. We will focus on the relationship between these issues, especially those involving the web user interface. This project will identify trends, and provide us with graphs demonstrating how the web has been evolving over the past ten years. By understanding these evolutionary trends we can inform and predict web development in the future.

This paper reviews evolution stages of websites and presents framework for websites analysis, based on the evolutionary approach of general systems theory. Development of websites and web-based applications is discussed, according to their historical emergence, usage, increasing complexity and integration of new aspects and principles. Resulting individual stages of this development are suggested in accordance with the evolutionary approach. Framework for websites analysis and evaluation is then presented in a form of criteria list for each defined stage. Website´s maturity (in the meaning of internet´s evolution) can be then determined by confronting these criteria