Website design practitioners and researchers have proposed criteria for effective website design based on experience and common sense, intuition, rules-of-thumb, and empirical studies of website usability. Typically, published checklists for evaluating websites emphasize design features such as information layout, navigability, and the technical performance of the website. University undergraduate students often first learn seriously about website design in introductory information systems courses. This paper describes a teaching pedagogy to help students learn how to evaluate commercial and organizational websites. The pedagogy emphasizes students developing their own criteria of website effectiveness and information quality, designing their own checklist incorporating those criteria, and then utilizing their checklist to rate websites in several e-commerce domains. The pedagogy emphasizes a mix of theoretical, practical, exercising, and real-world learning approaches.