Global by Design

According to Internet Retailer “Waterford Wedgwood plc has launched its first online destination and first direct-to-consumer e-commerce site in the U.S. for its Wedgwood china products, WedgwoodUSA.com. The site was designed and developed by Fry Inc.”

Interestingly, Wedgwood chose to park its US site at wedgwoodUSA.com instead of wedgwood.com, which is where they locate their global gateway. The reason for this is that .com is not synonymous with USA, contrary to popular opinion. Ideally, however, the US site should be located at wedgwood.us, using the US domain name.

Here’s the global gateway at www.wedgwood.co.uk.

This gateway would be much improved if they simply did away with the pull-down menu and placed the links on the Web page; it’s not as if they won’t fit. But it’s a start and I do expect to see this page evolve in the next twelve months.

• Update on Best Western’s Global Gateway
• World’s Largest Hotel Chain Expanding Global Web Sites
• Global Gateway Lessons From Japan
• Can You Find the Global Gateway?
• Global Web Site Review: Swagelok
• Belkin: Using Unicode to Create a More Global Gateway