Towards Designing Localized Websites

"If a website is usable in one country it is not necessary usable in another country, for that it is essential to consider the user and his/her culture who needs to use the website". Website users around the world belong to different cultures. Members of a particular culture share a common lifestyle, and to some extent they have their own way of viewing, thinking, understanding and doing things. This book explains the relationship between websites and the anthropologists' cultural dimensions in terms of web usability. Five different groups of anthropological dimensions of culture and cultural markers are proposed: E-culture, Stable, Broad, Variable, and Vista. The five groups are organized as levels in a pyramid, and in this way they allow for different degrees of website localization: from 1 (little localization) to 5 (full localization). Next, this pyramid is formally represented in a conceptual data model, the "Cultural Conceptual Model (C2M)", using Object Role Modelling (ORM). Based on the findings, a software tool called the Localized Website Design Advisor, or "LWDA", was built to dynamically generate localized website specifications and guidelines.