Web Design - Does One Size Fit Everyone?
If I’m building a site for an Australian business who wants to market their goods or services in another country should I be designing on the basis of what ‘works’ in Australia?
It’s an interesting question that my partner considered and wrote about several years ago. Back then she compared two shop windows and suggested that there was a lesson in those windows for anyone who was building websites. The shop windows she was talking about where two that we saw quite frequently.
One window belonged to a typically western-culture shop while the other was a riot of colours, contents and even smells and it belonged to a shop that catered for the local Chinese community … and the shop behind the window wasn’t much better. I know that we wondered how anyone could possibly find anything that they were looking for in a shop like that but the Chinese community certainly shopped there.
Anyway, like most husbands tend to do, I didn’t pay much attention to what Toni wrote but now I’m beginning to see that she was definitely on the right track and perhaps well ahead of many other people in what she was thinking about.
You see, the big noise now in search engine marketing circles is that what appeals to western cultures doesn’t appeal much to the Chinese and neat, clean websites like Google are not appealing to the Chinese at all.
You can read more about it in ‘A Tale of Two Cultures’ and it should certainly think about what your target market is for the sites that you design.