Abstract

HIV/AIDs infections continue at a high level with about 56,300 Americans becoming infected with HIV each year, while over a million people are living with HIV in the US. Of that number, about one in five people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) is not aware of his or her infection. This poses a major problem not just in the prevention of the disease, but also for improving the health of PLWHA. Health websites increasingly serve as a significant platform for the delivery of public health information. The current research study investigated the design of health websites. This study involved the construction of a new online instrument for having participants’ (N=200) evaluate the design of two government and two nongovernment HIV/AIDS websites. The highest rated features across all four websites involve the websites’ level of health literacy. There were also significant differences in the design of the government and the non-government websites. In terms of multimodal features, the results show that the participants rated the two non-government websites higher than the two government websites.