TPC-Journal-V2-Issue2

The Professional Counselor \Volume 2, Issue 2 165 is CACREP-accredited. Regarding faculty information, the majority of counseling programs posted faculty resource pages (97.7%) and faculty roster (87%). It was noticed that some counseling faculty members were listed within the collegial faculty roster and without a tag to identify who was a member of the counseling faculty. Table 1 also indicated that not every counselor educator had his or her essential information online for public browsing. Among the 1,469 listed counselor educators, students would be able to access the information containing faculty e-mail addresses (85.4%), highest degrees (73%), photos (68.3%), individual faculty webpages (59.6%), research interests (47.8%), licenses and credentials (35.5%), and faculty publications (35%). The lowest percentages of accessibility on faculty information were faculty vitas (22.9%) and faculty presentations (22.2%). Our findings confirmed the high percentage of faculty contact information and the low percentage of faculty descriptions reported by a previous study (McGlothlin et al., 2008). McGlothlin et al. (2008) reported that 87.7% of webpages contained faculty contact information and 46% contained faculty description. Our study further examined the contents of faculty description and found an uneven and inconsistent style of information disclosure. It was clear that not every listed faculty member displayed all of the following information online: (1) e-mail address, (2) highest earned degrees, (3) photos, (4) personal webpages, (5) research interests, (6) credentials or licenses, (7) publications, (8) presentations, and (9) vitas. These deficiencies may potentially pose difficulties for students who access program webpages for faculty information. Clearly, counseling programs should provide essential information for past, current and prospective students. Our results indicated that counseling programs had primarily constructed webpages with information for current and prospective students, as well as alumni. These student pages included student resources (100%), prospective students (99.5%), current students (98.6%), alumni (96.3%), and student employment (86.8%). The high percentages of accessibility demonstrated that counseling programs focused more on maintaining webpage information related to students. Our results concluded that most counseling programs considered the main function of their webpages as a tool to communicate with students due to the high percentage of student-related webpages. On the other hand, information about counseling programs themselves had not been valued equally. The introduction of counseling programs was less focused because the program contact information obtained a high accessibility rate, but the program missions and goals were often omitted. Faculty information appeared to have an even lower emphasis on program webpages. The low accessibility of faculty information was represented by the below 50% display rate of faculty’s research interests, licenses and credentials, publications, presentations, and vitas. Our findings suggest that CACREP counseling programs concentrate their web design efforts on enriching student-related pages, but devote less effort on the construction and maintenance of webpages displaying essential information on counseling programs and their faculty. However, this would be a debatable conclusion without further investigation on counseling students’ browsing preferences. Implications The use of webpages in counseling programs needs more thorough research to determine how to effectively disclose and exchange essential online information to students and the public. Several critical points and questions have been raised from our research that can assist future web design in counseling programs: 1. It is important to determine what essential materials should be disclosed and exchanged on program webpages. A proper web design and the quality of information disclosure are vital criteria for effective webpages (Maddux & Johnson, 1997). Counseling programs have to carefully consider how they want to be viewed on the Internet. Who are the potential viewers of department webpages? What specific information are viewers seeking? Will the information be useful to the viewers and benefit the programs? 2. Webpage marketing must monitor its dissemination of information and web design (Poock & Bishop, 2006). Information posted on webpages should attract viewers’ attention and satisfy browsing purposes. Careful consideration of web design can provide easy access to information sought by viewers. 3. Counseling programs need to consider the value of their webpages within the university web structures. When