Empowering School of Accounting websites through quality assurance: Development and implementation of a user-perceived instrument

Today’s institutions of higher education are facing an increased number of significant challenges taking place in the political, economic, social and technological environment. Accordingly, the issues of performance, accountability, and marketing strategies have become ever more important. It has been suggested that universities that are more market or customer orientated can perform better. In dealing with customers, most universities have utilised Web technologies for both informational and promotional purposes. The question is whether they have designed their Web sites well enough in order to gain the benefits from Web utilisation. Previous studies on quality of Web sites are not lacking, but most of them have focussed mainly on business Web sites. Empirical research that focuses on the Web site quality of institutions of higher education has been scarce. This study focuses on the websites of Schools of Accounting, and selects the websites of Schools of Accounting in New Zealand’s universities as the research objects. The main objectives of this study are to develop and validate an instrument for measuring School of Accounting website quality from the perspectives of the users, and to implement the proposed instrument to measure and rank the quality of websites of Schools of Accounting in New Zealand. The results from this initial application substantiated the validity and reliability of the instrument