Website Credibility
Introduction
What distinguishes a website as a credible source? As the internet continues to grow as a source of knowledge for people, there needs to be a system in place for determining its accuracy and reliability. http://www.cdc.gov.htm is a website created by the Center for Disease Control and is intended to provide consumers with information pertaining to diseases, emergencies, disasters, environmental health, travelers health, healthy living, workplace safety and more. This website can easily be found via the Google search engine. The following will discuss this website and determine if it is credible.
Authority
Authority can be defined as “the extent to which material is the creation of a person or organization that is recognized as having definitive knowledge of a given subject area.” (Usher & Skinner, 2008). The CDC is recognized as an accredited institution whose material is based on sound, researched evidence. The CDC has been in existence for over 60 years and is a well-known institution. On the website the CDC speaks of its core values. These are described as accountability by which their services are based on: sound scientific research and integrity by which there is a promise to disseminate information based on high quality data (http://www.cdc.gov/about/organization/mission.htm).
Information
The completeness of website information is an important step in evaluating website credibility. If a consumer of the website is reading incomplete information there is a possibility that detrimental results can occur (Dutta-Bergman, 2004). In order to have a credible website, the information presented in it should be well-organized, follow grammatical rules, have clearly labeled charts, graphs and tables and have documented sources. This helps the consumer verify facts and statistics (htrtp://libweb.uoregon.edu.html). One example of useful and credible information is found on the CDC website about healthy aging. By taking an in depth look at the information provided the consumer can see that the information dispensed is from clinical studies cited in the article. What furthers the credibility is the availability of the study to download.
Objectivity
Another aspect to evaluating a website for credibility is objectivity. Exploring the CDC website one has a sense of neutrality, that the information is straight forward and not biased. There is no advertising eliminating the possibility if any conflict of interest by an influencing outside party.
Ease of Navigation Ease of navigation is important for any website to be successful. For this to happen the website creators must assume that the consumers do not have any previous knowledge, or, they are laypeople. The CDC website has headings with clear purposes that you can click on to find out more information. This website is easy to navigate. By going to http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/tutorials/evironmental/orientation/navigate/index.htm a website navigation tutorial is available. While this is only for one particular area of the website (NHANCS) this can still be very helpful to consumers. The website also allows the consumer to adjust text size, receive updates via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and also allows audio or podcast options.
Policy and Security Policies The CDC website has a privacy policy notice which explains that this website does not record or collect any personal information unless the consumer decides to provide it. The only information that the website does collect is the IP address of the viewer, the visit date and time. The pages viewed and the last website the viewer visited before they viewed this one. For more information about privacy and security policies one can visit http://www.cdc.gov.html .
Professional Applicability The CDC website is applicable to the nursing practice by providing various courses and training programs, continuing education credits, data and statistics and important updates on diseases or conditions of current interest. The professional nurse can utilize the information gathered in this website for patient education tools, on site staff training and as a scholarly resource when furthering their own education.
Conclusion
The CDC website is found to be a reliable, credible website when examining authority, information, objectivity, ease of navigation and privacy and security policies. In a time when there is so much information available on the internet, it is important to be able to determine what sites are and are not credible