Building Websites for a Multinational Audience

Citation

du Preez, M. (2004), "Building Websites for a Multinational Audience", Online Information Review, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 162-162. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520410531709

When a Web site designer plans a new Web site, he or she should take the user's values and expectations into consideration, since a successful Web site presents the information to a user in a format to which he or she is accustomed. Linda Main tries to bring together the practical issues that should be considered by anyone building a Web site aimed at a global audience. In her book she takes a good look at practical issues such as understanding writing systems, character sets, encoding and Unicode, as well as using XHTML and CSS style sheets to build global Web pages.

This is no book for the layman or novice Web site designer, since Chapter 2 onwards assumes that the reader has:

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  a basic knowledge about designing and building Web sites;

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  some degree of experience with the hypertext mark‐up language (HTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS);

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  a current version of the Internet Explorer browser (IE 5.5 or IE 6); and

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  a Windows platform.

Main explains how a computer can handle various writing systems in her discussion on writing systems in Chapter 2. She then goes on to explain Unicode before showing how to put it all together on a Web page.

Chapter 3, “Subjective and objective cultural considerations”, uses Hofstede's model of culture to illustrate cultural dimensions and how his conclusions can be applied to Web pages designed for a Chinese audience. This chapter covers aspects such as the impact of power distance, collectivism, masculinity versus feminism, low uncertainty avoidance, and long‐term time orientation – all of these are discussed in relation to designing Chinese Web pages. It also considers subjective and objective cultural issues.

Chapter 4 gets down to work and advises on inputting Web content in a variety of languages. It stresses that translation is an important part of any localisation project and that the content must be available in the language(s) of the target audience(s). It further highlights some of the common features of the translation memory software programmes that are available on the market for use by translators and pays some attention to machine translation tools, multilingual search engines and chat rooms.

The use of dynamic XHTML and style sheets receive attention in Chapter 5, when the building‐block technique is discussed as a means to build Web sites for all audiences. The differences between HTML, XML, and XHTML are illustrated with a number of practical examples before showing how style sheets are used to control fonts and tables. Chapter 6 discusses the use of graphics and JavaScript, while Chapter 7 focuses on XML, XSLT, and SVG. All three chapters include a great number of examples to clearly illustrate the use of these computer languages. The final test of a multinational Web site receives attention in Chapter 8, and two appendixes conclude the volume.

Building Websites for a Multinational Audience is a useful reference tool for the experienced Web designer involved in designing multinational Web sites or who would want to focus on globalising Web pages.