Design Practices for Global Gateways

Most analysis of globalized websites begins and ends with U.S.-based high-tech companies or with early international movers like Amazon or Monster. For this report we chose to extend the analysis on three major axes: We looked at more countries, reviewed established companies with a global presence or a reason for one, and we considered a wider variety of market sectors. We visited the websites of 400 firms in 16 countries, looking for their “global gateways” to multilingual or sites with local content: Subscribe to our research and find out:

• Which languages should you support?
• Is yourcompany.com or yourcompany.it the way to go?
• What design conventions do visitors expect?

How is this report different from other surveys?
Our broad-based international statistics move analysis beyond the usual suspects. Moving beyond the U.S. high-tech sector, we saw how the web phenomenon manifests itself in other markets. We uncovered the countries and industry sectors most likely to host multilingual websites, and which countries and languages were most likely to be supported.

We analyzed how these companies pointed visitors to their multilingual content, searching for hints of user expectations by market. We also studied the likelihood of companies to identify themselves by the.com suffix rather than by their home market suffix (for example, .fr or .co.jp).

Who will benefit from this report?
Marketers and designers will benefit from our findings. Access to the design conventions of so many firms across a wide variety of geographies will help companies benchmark their own efforts against the best of the web worldwide. Strategists, corporate communications specialists, information architects, web designers, usability experts, and language service providers doing the translation work can view worldwide design trends, good and bad practices, and what local markets expect.

Who led the research?
This report effort was led by Don DePalma, who in 1996 was one of the first industry analysts to identify the content management category. In subsequent reports on CMS at Forrester he expanded his coverage to include organizational issues, the need for integral globalization, and the evolution to a corporate platform. This report is a critical next step in his vision of how content management will be transformed.