Category Archives: Web Globalization

Secrets of well-travelled web sites: Web globalization in the travel & hospitality industry

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I’m pleased to announce a new report focused on the globalization of travel and hospitality web sites.

From Hotels.com to Delta Airlines to Expedia, this report highlights those web sites (and mobile apps) that have the widest global reach and are the most user friendly — regardless of the user’s language or nationality.

Lionbridge sponsored the production of this report and is making the report available for free (registration required).

Lionbridge suggested the web sites they wanted to see included but they did not play any role in the analysis of these sites. I’ve been studying many of these companies for years now through the Web Globalization Report Card. For this report I slightly modified the Report Card methodology to reflect the importance of offering localized their mobile apps and/or mobile-optimized web sites.

Even if your company is not a member of this industry, you may find this report valuable. Few industries have been doing more to go mobile than companies within this industry. And yet we’re still very much in the early days of what it means to provide localized apps and mobile sites. This report sheds light on what’s happening right now and what companies have done the best job so far.

In all, this report scores 44 companies across a six segments, including hotels, airlines, rental cars, and online travel agencies. Companies include Starwood Hotels, Delta, Jet Blue, Trip Advisor, Expedia, Hotels.com, Avis, Carnival, among others.

You can download your copy for free by registering here.

And I also have a webinar planned for October 26th. Mark your calendar!

Another day, another abused country code

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Everyone has a hobby and I suppose one of mine is looking for web sites that use (or abuse) country codes (ccTLDs).

I was recently pointed to a new web app called It’s Almo.st.

If you’re into countdown clocks, this web site certainly does the trick.

As for me, I was interested to see the use of the .ST country code, which is the country code for São Tomé and Príncipe. (Do you see it in the image above?)

Clearly, this web site has nothing to do with the island nation off the coast of Africa. The writer in me enjoys seeing how start-ups make creative use of country codes to round out their brand names. But the ccTLD geek in me winces when I see ccTLDs used like Scrabble tiles.

Here’s my current list of companies that have used ccTLDs in non-standard ways. I’ve so far documented the use of 28 ccTLDs across 50 web sites.

If you come across any more, send them my way…

 

(Insert company name here) stumbles in China

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From the article Groupon stumbles in China in The Wall Street Journal:

Foreign Internet companies have long struggled in China, which has more Internet users than any other country. Yahoo Inc., one of the earliest to enter, handed over its China business in 2005 to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., and has since quarreled with the Chinese company. EBay Inc. sharply scaled back its presence in China after losing market share to an online shopping site owned by Alibaba. Google Inc. has seen its market share slide, to the benefit of rival Baidu Inc. since the U.S. company moved its Chinese-language search engine to Hong Kong out of frustration over censorship and hacking issues.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.*

 

IBM: A tale of two global gateways

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IBM, much to my chagrin, has used a lengthy pull-down menu as its global gateway for years.

Here’s what it looks like:

There are two problems with this menu, the first being that web users in Sweden, Turkey and other countries in the lower end of the alphabet are forced to do a fair amount of scrolling.

The second problem is the names of the languages themselves. As you can see here, “French” really should be displayed in French and not in English. After all, the goal is to appear to users in their preferred languages. This may seem like a minor detail, but it’s not.

Recently, I discovered that the IBM careers web site makes use a different (and improved) global gateway shown here:

Notice how the countries are presented in an overlay menu instead of a pull-down menu. No more scrolling!

Unfortunately, the languages are still not presented in their native languages. I do want to commend IBM for at least displaying the language that is supported by each country site.  I cannot emphasize enough that letting users know that their language is not supported is just as important as letting them know that their language is supported. Don’t hide this information!

It will be interesting to see in the months ahead if the main IBM web site adopts the careers global gateway.

For more on global gateways, check out my book.