Can They Find What They're Looking For? - Page 6
October 14, 2002
Can They Find What They're Looking For?
Your web site needs to be usable to people around the world, yet not all people
have the same Internet connections, browsers, web savvy, and preconceptions.
To ensure that your site remains as usable in Norway as it is in Nebraska, pay
close attention to the factors in the following sections.
Bandwidth
The broadband revolution is taking a little longer than expected. According
to most analysts, the U.S. won't reach a critical mass in broadband usage
until 2005 or later. The rest of the world, with the exception of parts of Asia
and Europe, is much further behind in high-speed Internet connections. So if
most of the world is still accessing the Internet at 56Kbps or slower, why do
companies build sites that can be easily viewed only with broadband connections?
Even if you're targeting businesses, which are more likely to use broadband
connections, the percentage of broadband users outside the U.S. rarely justifies
designing a bandwidth-hogging web site.
Note - Only 10% of households in France, Germany, and the
UK will have broadband Internet access by 2005.
Source: Gartner (http://www.gartner.com),
February 2002.
As shown in Figure 7.7, the weight of your
web site in kilobytes directly affects the amount of time your audience must
wait to view your site. If you want your site to be popular outside the U.S.,
keep its total weight at 70KB or lower. Given that the average web page weight
for Fortune 500 sites is more than 90KB, odds are you have some graphics to
remove. But the result will be worth it, not just for your foreign visitors,
but even for a good portion of your domestic audience.
Figure 7.7
The weight and the waiting: Home page weight and download time when using a
56Kbps modem.
For more information on building web pages that don't keep international
users waiting, see Chapter 11.
Measurements
While the world largely embraced the metric system, the U.S. largely ignored
it. Today, Americans still measure their driving in miles per hour, their gas
tanks in gallons, and the temperature in Fahrenheit degrees. Although these
forms of measurement work fine in the U.S., they range from troublesome to meaningless
in most other countries.
Paper sizes are also a source of frustration. The standard letter size in the
U.S. is 81?2x11 inches, but the rest of the world has
a different idea of "standard." The A4 standard is actually much more
common. Remember the International Standards Organization (ISO)? It has a standard
for paper, too: A4 (specified by ISO 216). A4 is metric-based and, at 21cmx29.7cm
(approximately 8 1/4x11 3/4 inches),
is narrower and longer than the American letter.
FYI - For more information about international page sizes,
go to http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html.
Why do paper sizes matter to web developers? If you want users to be able to
print your web pages, you have to make sure the margins are narrower than usual.
Also, many companies provide marketing brochures and white papers in PDF files
for download. All too often, they are formatted in letter size, which only frustrates
users who find that the pages print with the edges chopped off.
Clothing sizes could also use a bit of standardization, not just within the
U.S., but globally. When Victoria's Secret first ventured into localization,
it focused on developing a customer service page in each of the target languages.
A good percentage of these pages was devoted to converting sizing information
across locales, as shown in the conversion chart in Figure
7.8. In the future, Victoria's Secret plans to make this function dynamic
so that users in a given locale are instantly presented with the local size,
without having to convert it themselves.
Figure 7.8
Victoria's Secret conversion chart.
Acting Locally - Page 5
Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies
Numerical Notation - Page 7
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